Policy Briefs

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Strengthening the IAEA: How the Nuclear Watchdog Can Regain Its Bark

Gregory L. Schulte

Yukiya Amano recently became the new Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the world’s nuclear watchdog. Amano, an experienced Japanese diplomat, faces a challenging agenda: stalled investigations into the clandestine nuclear activities of Iran and Syria, the need to ensure high levels of safety and security as more countries opt for nuclear power, the dangers associated with the spread of technologies readily diverted to build nuclear bombs, a threat of nuclear terrorism not taken seriously by all IAEA members, and a Board of Governors too often split between developed and developing countries.
Iraqi Security Forces after U.S. Troop Withdrawal: An Iraqi Perspective

Najim Abed Al-Jabouri

Recent U.S. assessments of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) have shown a slow but constant improvement in overall performance and combat capability, but have noted the continuing destructive effect of political influence on the forces. Major challenges remain, including corruption, weak rule of law, overlap in responsibilities, sectarianism, logistical deficiencies, and the lack of professionalism. Despite the overall improvement in the Iraqi forces, as recently as March 2009 the Department of Defense (DOD) reported that they are incapable of operating independently.¹
To Build Resilience: Leader Influence on Mental Hardiness

Paul T. Bartone, Charles L. Barry, and Robert E. Armstrong

The military profession is inherently stressful and is getting more so for U.S. troops, who are deploying more often and for longer periods of time on missions that are multifaceted, changeable, and ambiguous. Such stressful conditions can lead to a range of health problems and performance decrements even among leaders. But not everyone reacts in negative ways to environmental stress. Most people remain healthy and continue to perform well even in the face of high stress levels. While much attention in recent years has focused on identifying and treating stress-related breakdowns such as post-traumatic stress disorder, scant investment has gone toward the study of healthy, resilient response patterns in people.
Aligning Disarmament to Nuclear Dangers: Off to a Hasty START?

David A. Cooper

Although the strategic arms reductions required by the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) have long since been fulfilled, there are sound reasons to preserve aspects of this legacy treaty beyond December 5, 2009.¹ While few have seen this as a top national security priority, there has been no real dispute about the desirability of trying to extend at least some START elements, most notably its longstanding verification provisions. If nothing else, these proven mechanisms underpin the standalone reductions in operationally deployed strategic warheads that the more recent Moscow Treaty requires by 2012.² As then–Secretary of State Colin Powell noted in submitting the Moscow Treaty to President George W. Bush in 2002, “START’s comprehensive verification regime will provide the foundation for confidence, transparency and predictability in [these] further strategic offensive reductions.”³ Largely with the aim to preserve this transparency infrastructure, the Bush administration responded positively to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s call in 2006 for talks on a new treaty to replace START, which began in March 2007. However, this effort never produced a common understanding on the basic shape of a new agreement. Both sides agreed early on that they did not want to extend START per se. But whereas the United States simply wanted to enhance the Moscow Treaty with transparency measures drawn from, or, in some cases, going beyond START, Russia sought an entirely new treaty that would effectively supersede the Moscow Treaty. Its main goal was to shift the operative unit of account for Moscow Treaty reductions from deployed warheads to the START formula focusing on delivery systems.⁴ Fundamentally, the Bush administration viewed the Moscow Treaty approach as advantageous to U.S. interests, and therefore was unwilling to contemplate superseding this basic framework merely for the sake of extending verification measures.⁵
U.S.-Mexico Defense Relations: An Incompatible Interface

Craig A. Deare

The U.S. national security community has begun to pay greater attention to Mexico in 2009. Reports of unprecedented (in recent history, at least) violence related primarily to drug trafficking organizations (DTOs)¹ and speculation regarding the Mexican government’s ability to adequately address the deteriorating security situation have reached the attention of the President, National Security Advisor, Director of National Intelligence, Secretary of State, Attorney General, Secretary of Homeland Security, and Secretary of Defense. This escalation of issues beyond the bureaucratic levels that routinely deal with Mexico in the security realm is unusual.
Breaking the Yardstick: The Dangers of Market-based Governance

Don J. DeYoung

In the middle of the last century, America became a superpower. It happened, in part, because of a well-balanced technological partnership between the Federal Government and commercial sector. After winning a world war against fascism, this public-private alliance went on to cure infectious diseases, create instant global communications, land humans on the Moon, and prevail in a long Cold War against communism. This, and more, was accomplished without bankrupting the Nation’s economy. The partnership’s record of service to the American people and the world has been remarkable.
Hybrid Threats: Reconceptualizing the Evolving Character of Modern Conflict

Frank Hoffman

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates directly challenged the Pentagon’s strategists and military chiefs in an important speech at the National Defense University in September 2008. The speech was a critical assessment of the prevailing U.S. military culture and the prism through which our Armed Forces see themselves. This prism clarifies what is important about the future and how we posture our forces for the future. Secretary Gates questioned that mindset and its hold on the Services and the Department of Defense’s capitalization practices.
From Sputnik to Minerva: Education and American National Security

Sean Kay

This paper examines how external challenges have prompted national investments in education to enhance American national security. Rather than focusing primarily on traditional professional military education, this analysis examines how education has been used as a tool of American power. Four major moments of transformation in the international system are surveyed to illustrate a link between strategic educational capacity, defined as the application of attained knowledge and skills, and national power. The study then assesses how education is used as a power asset in the contemporary security environment. Today, an important educational capacity is emerging in the new Minerva program in the Department of Defense and other transformational educational concepts with security applications. Education is gaining an increasing interest among American decisionmakers as a strategic component of American power and an essential asset for successful military operations in the new global security environment.
A 21st-century Concept of Air and Military Operations

Robbin F. Laird

The evolution of 21st-century air operations is unfolding under the impact of a new generation of fighter aircraft and a significant shift in the role of air operations in support of ground and maritime forces. So-called fifth-generation aircraft often are mistakenly viewed as simply the next iteration of airframes: fast, stealthy replacements of obsolescent legacy platforms. In fact, the capabilities of fifth-generation aircraft, and their integration into a network-centric joint force, will change the roles of manned fighter aircraft in air, ground, and maritime operations. These changes are so far-reaching that the Services face the challenge of crafting a new concept of 21st-century air operations, indeed, of all combat operations.
Unity of Effort: Key to Success in Afghanistan

Christopher J. Lamb and Martin Cinnamond

The U.S. Government strategy for success in Afghanistan unveiled by President Obama on March 27, 2009, emphasized a classic population-centric counterinsurgency approach. The novelty of this approach can be debated, but clearly the emphasis has shifted under the Obama administration. Securing the population and reducing civilian casualties are now the focus of attention. This approach should be more popular with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Allies, who prefer stabilization operations to offensive operations against insurgents, and with the Afghan government, which has vocally objected to operations that produce inadvertent civilian casualties. The possibility of greater support from Allies and the Afghan government increases the likelihood that the strategy can be executed with better unity of effort. The architects of the new strategy recognize that it puts a premium on better collaboration and that they have limited time for demonstrating progress. In these circumstances, taking every reasonable step to strengthen unity of effort is necessary.
Cyberspace and the “First Battle” in 21st-century War

Robert A. Miller and Daniel T. Kuehl

Wars often start well before main forces engage. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, combat often began when light cavalry units crossed the border. For most of the 20th century, the “first battle” typically involved dawn surprise attacks, usually delivered by air forces.¹ While a few of these attacks were so shattering that they essentially decided the outcome of the struggle or at least dramatically shaped its course—the Israeli air force’s attack at the opening of the June 1967 Six-Day War comes to mind—in most cases the defender had sufficient strategic space—geographic and/or temporal—to recover and eventually redress the strategic balance to emerge victorious. The opening moments of World War II for Russia and the United States provide two examples.
Radicalization by Choice: ISI and the Pakistani Army

Robert B. Oakley and Franz-Stefan Gady

Events in Pakistan today resemble a fast-moving kaleidoscope. Although it is impossible to predict the future, Pakistan’s very existence as a state undoubtedly is at stake. The danger this poses to the region and to the United States is of the greatest magnitude. For better or worse, the Pakistani army and its intelligence unit, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), remain the most important elements in determining Pakistan’s future. The army establishment is the glue that holds this large multi-ethnic, nuclear-armed Muslim country together. Throughout Pakistan’s history, the army has served as “kingmaker” with decisive influence on political leadership, as guarantor of stability within the state, and as protector of the nation against external threats.
North Korea: Challenges, Interests, and Policy

James J. Przystup

On April 14, 2009, Pyongyang, in response to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) statement condemning North Korea’s April 4 rocket launch, ended its participation in the Six-Party Talks aimed at the denuclearization of North Korea and added that it “will no longer be bound to any agreement” of those talks. Pyongyang also declared its intent to “strengthen our self- defensive deterrent in every way.” On May 25, North Korea conducted its second nuclear test. On July 4, North Korea test fired seven missiles into the Sea of Japan.
The United States and the Asia-Pacific Region: National Interests and Strategic Imperatives

James J. Przystup

From its earliest days, the United States has been engaged in trade with East Asia. In February 1784, the Empress of China left New York harbor, sailing east to China, arriving at Macau on the China coast in August of that year. The ship returned to the United States the following May with a consignment of Chinese goods, which generated a profit of $30,000. In 1844, China granted the United States trading rights in the Treaty of Wanghia.
Managing Strategic Competition with China

Phillip C. Saunders

In the Obama administration’s first major speech on Asia policy, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton highlighted the need for a “positive, cooperative relationship” with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that could help the United States address an array of global challenges. Dismissing the view that a rising China must be an adversary, she argued that “the United States and China can benefit from and contribute to each other’s successes” and stressed the importance of working “to build on areas of common concern and shared opportunities.”¹ Her subsequent remarks in Beijing highlighted the importance of U.S.-China cooperation in addressing the global economic crisis, building a partnership on clean energy and climate change, and working together on a range of shared international security challenges.² Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg later called for building a “positive, cooperative and comprehensive U.S.-China relationship for the 21st century.”³
Ukraine Against Herself: To Be Euro-Atlantic, Eurasian, or Neutral?

Jeffrey Simon

Ever since Ukraine declared independence in August 1991, its main security preoccupation and challenge has been its search for identity. Nostalgic to maintain its long and close association with Russia, which has become increasingly competitive with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU), and at the same time eager to become a more cooperative and close partner with the Euro-Atlantic community, Ukraine has consistently tried to have it both ways. On the one hand, Ukrainian political leaders’ aspirations for membership in Euro-Atlantic institutions have been driven, in part, by the desire to solidify independence from Russia. This impulse has roots that go back to the earliest days of its independence, when the fate of ex-Soviet nuclear weapons deployed on Ukrainian territory was being decided and Kyiv appealed to the United States and its NATO Allies for security guarantees against the specter of Russian resurgence.
Diverging Roads: 21st-century U.S.-Thai Defense Relations

Lewis M. Stern

Security issues were the core motivat-ing force behind Washington’s commitment to preserve Thailand’s sovereignty and dignity at the end of World War II—even as our British and French allies sought to treat the kingdom as a belligerent that should have been occu-pied and compelled to pay reparations for its wartime alliance with Japan. The rationale for the postwar alliance with the United States was the common commitment to opposing and containing the threat of communism.
U.S.-Cambodia Defense Relations: Defining New Possibilities

Lewis M. Stern

In his speech to the International Institute for Strategic Studies annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in late May 2009, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates laid out a vision of U.S. policy toward the region. The vision relies on longstanding treaty allies in Southeast Asia—the Philippines, Thailand, and Australia—as “cornerstones of U.S. foreign policy.” However, that vision does not stop there: it is designed to build a “new comprehensive partnership” with Indonesia and Singapore, to increase cooperation with Malaysia and Vietnam, and “to forge new partnerships in places long disregarded. This includes our emerging dialogue with Cambodia, as well as developments with Laos.” The dialogue with Cambodia thus holds out the prospect of a new partnership with a “long disregarded” country.
U.S.-Vietnam Defense Relations: Deepening Ties, Adding Relevance

Lewis M. Stern

The bilateral defense relationship with Vietnam developed in three phases. The first phase, from initial contacts during which the notion of defense normalization was broached in 1995–1996 to the preparations for the March 2000 visit of then–Secretary of Defense William Cohen, was characterized by Vietnamese caution regarding U.S. intentions, and matching reservations in Washington plus a concern regarding the importance of preserving the prisoner of war/missing in action (POW/MIA) priority focus.
Burma in Strategic Perspective: Renewing Discussion of Options

Lewis M. Stern, George Thomas, and Julia A. Thompson

U.S. policy toward Burma has kept attention riveted on democracy, on nudging the Burmese military junta toward a commitment to elections, on holding the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) to high standards regarding human rights and religious freedom, and on galvanizing regional and global support for a policy trajectory that edges the country closer to a moment when free speech, assembly, and freedom from fear dislodge the stranglehold of the military dictatorship that has dominated Burma since the early 1990s.
STAR–TIDES and Starfish Networks: Supporting Stressed Populations with Distributed Talent

Linton Wells II, Walker Hardy, Vinay Gupta, and Daniel Noon

The Department of Defense increasingly is involved in postwar stabilization and reconstruction, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief missions, capacity-building of partner nations at home and abroad, and other such complex operations. To provide sustainable support to stressed populations in these environments, an international, networked, knowledge-sharing research project called Sustainable Technologies, Accelerated Research–Transformative Innovation for Development and Emergency Support (STAR–TIDES)¹ encourages innovative approaches to public-private collaboration, whole-of-government solutions, and transnational engagement. It leverages a distributed network of people and organizations to conduct research, support real world contingencies, and bridge gaps among disparate communities.
Lessons of Abu Ghraib: Understanding and Preventing Prisoner Abuse in Military Operations

Paul T. Bartone

The abuse of prisoners by U.S. Soldiers at Abu Ghraib had broad strategic consequences, leading many people around the world to question the legitimacy of U.S. goals and activities in Iraq. This paper draws on extensive unclassified reports from multiple investigations that followed Abu Ghraib, and applies key psychological as well as social-situational perspectives to develop a better grasp of the causative factors. From a psychological standpoint, most young adults are powerfully inclined to behave in accord with the social conventions and pressures around them. Especially in ambiguous circumstances, then, it is important that standards of behavior be clear and explicit throughout all phases of an operation and that leaders at all levels represent and reinforce those standards.
Irregular Warfare: New Challenges for Civil-Military Relations

Patrick M. Cronin

Persistent irregular conflict poses difficult new challenges for command and leadership and civil-military relations in general. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq amply demonstrate these challenges. The Iraq engagement began with a short, conventional war that aimed massive military power to defeat a hostile state and depose its leader. The Commander in Chief, with the approval of civilian leaders in Congress, authorized the action, and military commanders carried it out successfully. But after the initial goals were achieved, the engagement in Iraq rapidly devolved into a counterinsurgency. Similarly, as conflict in Afghanistan shows, in an irregular war against an asymmetric, nonstate threat, the traditional lanes of authority no longer clearly separate the activities of the political leaders responsible for managing the engagement, the military commanders responsible for executing it, and the civilian officials responsible for diplomacy, humanitarian assistance, and reconstruction.
So Many Zebras, So Little Time: Ecological Models and Counterinsurgency Operations

Mark D. Drapeau, Peyton C. Hurley, and Robert E. Armstrong

Force ratios are an important variable in warfare and in nature. On the Serengeti, large zebra herds are constantly hunted by small prides of lions. But with their overwhelming majority, why don’t the zebras unite and attack the lions? Hooves can be as deadly as claws when used correctly. And conversely, if the lions are such effective predators, why are there so many zebras?

Ecological interactions between predators and their prey are complex. Sometimes the few prey on the many; picture a whale devouring thousands of docile microorganisms. And sometimes the many prey on the few, as with killer bees attacking an unsuspect- ing person. During the past century, the mathematics underlying different types of survival strategies for attacker and evader have been worked out by ecologists, and we now have a fairly good understanding of such relationships.

While not a perfect metaphor, it is striking that these quantitative ecology models greatly resemble behavioral interactions during counterinsurgency operations. While a predator-prey model alone may be too simplistic to fully describe counterinsur- gency, there are more detailed ecological models of competition that better capture the essence of the problem.

The purpose of this paper is not to provide definitive solutions, but to suggest a framework for other researchers to adapt and expand upon. Indeed, many of the models discussed are common to both ecologists and economists. The goals of both types of modeling are similar: maximizing profits in terms of food or money at the least risk—death or bankruptcy.

From our preliminary work on the possible applications of ecology to counterinsurgency, we hope that others more adept at the use of these quantitative models will make significant contributions to the area of predictive ability in combating terrorism and understanding unconventional warfare.
China’s Rising Influence in Asia: Implications for U.S. Policy

Ellen L. Frost, James J. Przystup, and Phillip C. Saunders

Asia’s strategic landscape is shifting. With colonialism and the Cold War now distant memories, regional political alignments are more flexible, open-ended, and constructive than they have been since the mid-20th century. Region-wide stability and the adoption of market-oriented economic policies have unleashed growth and sparked record levels of trade and investment. The peaceful management of disputes has become the rule rather than the exception.