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China’s Rising Influence in Asia: Implications for U.S. Policy

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

The balance of power in East Asia is stable and favors the United States, but the balance of influence is tipping toward Beijing. China’s growing weight stems from its size and market dynamism, reinforced by newfound military restraint and skillful diplomacy that have enhanced its ability to translate power into influence. The shift in the balance of influence, if unaddressed, could undermine U.S. interests.
Cyber Influence and International Security

Franklin D. Kramer and Larry Wentz

This paper examines the growing role of cyber influence in shaping international security, strategic competition, and state behavior in the information age. It explores how information technologies, digital networks, and cyber capabilities are increasingly used to influence political outcomes, shape perceptions, disrupt adversaries, and advance national objectives below the threshold of conventional conflict. This paper analyzes the strategic implications of cyber-enabled influence operations for U.S. national security and discusses the evolving challenges posed by information dominance, technological interconnectivity, and nontraditional forms of conflict in the digital era.
The Absence of Europe: Implications for International Security?

Steven Philip Kramer

Facing a worsening economic situation and a war in Iraq that will be difficult to end—in short, grave overstretch—the next U.S. adminis- tration will seek to return to a more multilateral foreign policy and attempt to work closely with Europe. But Europe may not be willing or able to meet American expectations to play a larger role in international security.
Energy Security in South Asia: Can Interdependence Breed Stability?

Joseph McMillan

South Asia is projected to play a major role in global energy markets over the next several decades, with India alone expected to become the world’s third largest importer of petroleum by 2030. Satisfying the region’s growing demands will require a heightened degree of energy interdependence among historically antagonistic states. Consequently, like it or not, regional leaders will face a tradeoff between traditional desires for energy self-sufficiency and the ambitious development targets that they have set for themselves. Achieving such growth, therefore, requires that India, Pakistan, and the other countries of South Asia first address the persistent international disputes that hamper cross-border energy trade, establish effective control over presently ungoverned areas, reorient the missions of military forces to some extent, and develop a better understanding of the effects that energy interdependence will have on broader relations with neighbors.
Defense Transformation à la française and U.S. Interests

Leo G. Michel

France has embarked on a transformation of its national security strategy, structures, capabilities, and relationships with Allies and other international partners. At its core, this transformation reflects a growing French consensus that globalization—especially the emergence of new, less predictable threats and vulnerabilities—has profoundly altered defense requirements since the last comprehensive review in the mid-1990s. But President Nicolas Sarkozy, faced with a large budget deficit, is determined to meet those requirements without near-term increases in defense spending.
Strategic Fragility: Infrastructure Protection and National Security in the Information Age

Robert A. Miller and Irving Lachow

Modern societies have reached unprecedented levels of prosperity, yet they remain vulnerable to a wide range of possible disruptions. One significant reason for this growing vulnerability is the developed world’s reliance on an array of interlinked, interdependent critical infrastructures that span nations and even continents. The advent of these infrastructures over the past few decades has resulted in a tradeoff: the United States has gained greater productivity and prosperity at the risk of greater exposure to widespread systemic collapse. The trends that have led to this growing strategic fragility show no sign of slowing. As a result, the United States faces a new and different kind of threat to national security.

This paper explores the factors that are creating the current situation. It examines the implications of strategic fragility for national security and the range of threats that could exploit this condition. Finally, it describes a variety of response strategies that could help address this issue. The challenges associated with strategic fragility are complex and not easily resolved. However, it is evident that policymakers will need to make difficult choices soon; delaying important decisions is itself a choice, and one that could produce disastrous results.
NATO’s Uncertain Future: Is Demography Destiny?

Jeffrey Simon

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is no stranger to controversy. Over the past 60 years, it has endured disputes over defense strategy, the role of nuclear weapons, the size and composition of its membership, and how best to respond to looming challenges beyond its immediate territory. Today, however, the Atlantic Alliance finds itself increasingly stressed by emerging socioeconomic and political changes among the Allies—changes that are fundamentally influenced by larger demographic shifts now occurring within its membership and that, taken together, will almost certainly hamper its collective ability to deploy operational forces and further strain the transatlantic relationship in the years ahead. This paper offers a preliminary assessment of these trends, focusing specifically on the kinds of impacts that each is having, or will have, upon the Allies and the challenges for Alliance solidarity that may result.
The Role of Medical Diplomacy in Stabilizing Afghanistan

Donald F. Thompson

Comprehensive stabilization and reconstruction of Afghanistan are not possible given the current fragmentation of responsibilities, narrow lines of authorities, and archaic funding mechanisms. Afghans are supportive of U.S. and international efforts, and there are occasional signs of progress, but the insurgent threat grows as U.S. military and civilian agencies and the international community struggle to bring stability to this volatile region. Integrated security, stabilization, and reconstruction activities must be implemented quickly and efficiently if failure is to be averted. Much more than a course correction is needed to provide tangible benefits to the population, develop effective leadership capacity in the government, and invest wisely in reconstruction that leads to sustainable economic growth. A proactive, comprehensive reconstruction and stabilization plan for Afghanistan is crucial to counter the regional terrorist insurgency, much as the Marshall Plan was necessary to combat the communist threat from the Soviet Union.¹ This paper examines the health sector as a microcosm of the larger problems facing the United States and its allies in efforts to stabilize Afghanistan.
Challenges to Persian Gulf Security: How Should the United States Respond?

Judith S. Yaphe

Persian Gulf security challenges will increasingly pose difficult choices for the next administration. Iran’s quest for regional preeminence, driven by the impulses of exceptionalism and self-sufficiency that are deeply engrained in the country’s political psyche, will not slacken any time soon. Seeing such preeminence as its historic prerogative, Tehran still aspires to acquire a military posture, including nuclear capability, commensurate with that vision.
The European Union: Measuring Counterterrorism Cooperation

David T. Armitage Jr.

The United States and European Union (EU) are natural partners in the global war on terror, but cooperation, although absolutely necessary, is inherently difficult. Primary responsibility for most European counterterrorism policies remains with the separate governments of the 27 EU countries, which has presented coordination problems both within the EU and between the United States and European Union. Asymmetries in capacities and perceived vulnerabilities affect how different member states address counterterrorism. Institutional dynamics—not only among the various EU institutions but also between the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—influence the degree of cooperation as well.
Privatizing While Transforming

Marion E. “Spike” Bowman

This paper examines the expanding role of private contractors in modern U.S. military operations and the challenges created by their growing presence in conflict zones. As contractors assume functions once performed by military personnel, including logistics, security, training, and interrogation, existing legal, regulatory, and operational frameworks struggle to keep pace. The paper explores how privatization in the contemporary battlespace is reshaping civil-military relationships, accountability, and the laws governing armed conflict.
Can Deterrence Be Tailored?

M. Elaine Bunn

Deterrence, the hallmark of Cold War–era security, needs to be adapted to fit the more volatile security environment of the 21st century. The Bush administration has outlined a concept for tailored deterrence to address the distinctive challenges posed by advanced military competitors, regional powers armed with weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and nonstate terrorist networks—while assuring allies and dissuading potential competitors.
Trans-American Security: What’s Missing?

Luigi R. Einaudi

The countries of the Western Hemisphere are more integrated than ever, with both each other and countries elsewhere, but critical aspects of their relationships remain hampered by outdated patterns and stereotypes. As the United States has focused on terrorism in the Middle East and Asia, its neighbors are developing more assertive roles on the world stage.
Organizing for National Security: Unification or Coordination?

James M. Keagle and Adrian R. Martin

This paper examines whether national security challenges are better addressed through centralized unification or improved interagency coordination. It explores the organizational tensions between integration, flexibility, and bureaucratic effectiveness in U.S. national security structures, arguing that complex modern threats require more adaptive and collaborative approaches across government institutions.
I-Power: The Information Revolution and Stability Operations

Franklin D. Kramer, Larry Wentz, and Stuart Starr

This paper examines how information and information technology can improve the effectiveness of stability operations when integrated into a broader civilian-military strategy. It argues that coordinated planning, data-sharing, international partnerships, and host-nation focused information systems can strengthen stabilization and reconstruction efforts. This piece emphasizes the importance of collaborative governance, commercial technology, and integrated information management in supporting long-term stability operations.
Responding in the Homeland: A Snapshot of NATO’s Readiness for CBRN Attacks

Michael Moodie, Robert E. Armstrong, and Tyler Merkeley

The possibility of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members having to respond to a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) incident is not a hypothetical scenario reserved for training exercises. Indeed, a number of countries worldwide have considerable experience in dealing with a variety of naturally occurring, accidental, and deliberate CBRN incidents. NATO itself, however, has no clear conceptual vision of its role in civil emergencies because preparedness of this sort remains a national responsibility.

For many years, NATO’s military forces have addressed CBRN issues as part of their military planning. But the question remains as to how NATO nations view the capability of their military forces and the contribution that these forces can make in dealing with the consequences of a domestic CBRN attack within one or several member countries. This paper provides insights into current thinking of NATO members—based on an informal survey of Alliance military attaches assigned to Washington, DC—regarding the planning, assets, and training for such a contingency.

The resulting snapshot of NATO CBRN capabilities suggests specific initiatives that should be considered within the Alliance to improve its collective response to a CBRN incident. Areas recommended for particular emphasis and further study include bolstering Alliance capabilities for biological and radiological contingencies; strengthening command and control and logistics capabilities; addressing the airlift shortfall; intensifying multilateral exercises; and creating an Alliance-wide mechanism for sharing lessons learned.
The Country Team: Restructuring America’s First Line of Engagement

Robert B. Oakley and Michael Casey

U.S. Embassies face unprecedented challenges. The kinds of issues that confound governments today—from organized crime, drug trafficking, and terrorism to nuclear proliferation, human rights, ethnosectarian conflict, global disease, and climate change—no longer fit within diplomacy’s traditional categories.¹ Just as nonstate actors everywhere are becoming more powerful, regions of geostrategic importance in the developing world find themselves beset by weak or dysfunctional governments and increasingly perilous socioeconomic situations. While some might reasonably question the categorical quality of the 2002 National Security Strategy’s assertion that “America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones,” there is still plenty of reason to be concerned about the trends.²
The Comprehensive Approach Initiative: Future Options for NATO

Friis Arne Petersen and Hans Binnendijk

Experience has shown that conflict resolution requires the application of all elements of national and international power—political, diplomatic, economic, financial, informational, social, and commercial, as well as military. To resolve conflicts or crises, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) should adopt a Comprehensive Approach that would enable the collaborative engagement of all requisite civil and military elements of international power to end hostilities, restore order, commence reconstruction, and begin to address a conflict’s root causes. NATO can provide the military element for a comprehensive approach. Many other national, international, and nongovernmental actors can provide the civilian elements.

In May 2007, the Royal Danish Embassy in Washington, DC, and the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at the National Defense University held an informal workshop of experts from across the Alliance to explore options for creating an international comprehensive approach to postconflict stabilization and reconstruction. This paper is the product of that workshop and subsequent collaborations. It endeavors to describe the major requirements for conflict resolution, what NATO has learned from its post–Cold War experiences to date in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, and how a more effective program of international civil and military engagement can be put in place.

Much work remains to be done to flesh out the initiative, but already it is clear that military efforts in the field must be complemented throughout any operation by nonmilitary means that bring to bear the expert civil competencies of other actors, both national and international. In the Balkans and Afghanistan, NATO engaged with other actors belatedly through ad hoc, situational arrangements. Not knowing in advance what roles and which participants will eventually come into play results in longer and more costly conflict resolution in terms of lives, treasure, and ultimate effectiveness.
Preventing Balkan Conflict: The Role of Euroatlantic Institutions

Jeffrey Simon

Since the end of the Cold War, the Balkan region has presented major security challenges to the United States and Europe. The instability and weak governance of the region remain an important concern in the post-9/11 period. Balkan regional tensions erupted in several wars resulting from the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia in 1991. After a slow initial response from Europe and confronted by an inadequate United Nations (UN) effort in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), the United States convinced the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to initiate a decade-long peacekeeping mission to safeguard implementation of the Dayton Accords. Then, in an effort to halt a humanitarian catastrophe stemming from ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, NATO engaged in an air campaign against Serbia and another major peacekeeping operation in Kosovo.¹
After the Surge: Next Steps in Iraq?

Judith S. Yaphe

The U.S. military “surge” initiated in mid-2007 in Baghdad and neighboring Iraqi provinces has been largely successful in military terms. It has helped to lower the level of violence suffered by Iraqis and Americans alike and, in tandem with other steps, has restored a measure of security to western Iraq and portions of Baghdad. Yet military operations alone are insufficient to restore stability and keep the country intact.
Custer in Cyberspace

David C. Gompert and Richard L. Kugler

The combination of abundant networked information and fluid, unfamiliar situations in the current era makes it at once possible and imperative to improve decisionmaking in combat. The key to improvement is to integrate faster reasoning and more reliable intuition into a cognitive whole to achieve battle-wisdom. Although the technologies that both demand and facilitate battle- wisdom are new, military history holds lessons on combining reasoning and intuition in conditions of urgency, danger, and uncertainty.

Today’s fast and distributed style of war has antecedents in the reconnaissance and strike operations of 19th-century American cavalry, which depended on similar qualities—speed, flexibility, and command “at the edge.” Cavalry officers had to make quick decisions in unfamiliar circumstances with imperfect information, and without seeking instructions.

There may be no more arresting case of fateful decisionmaking by a commander in combat than that of George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Custer’s reliance on his legendary intuitive powers, which had produced many victories during the Civil War, was his undoing. Instead of analyzing his options when he learned of Major Reno’s failed attack and Indian strength, he evidently satisfied himself that his original plan still made sense. Famous for his self-confidence, Custer never asked himself the critical question: Could I be wrong?

Although intuition remains central to decisionmaking under time pressure, the ability to combine intuition with reason in the crush of battle is increasingly important to commanders. The need for this combination of cognitive skills has implications for the recruitment, retention, development, selection, training, and education of military decisionmakers.
Lee’s Mistake: Learning from the Decision to Order Pickett’s Charge

David C. Gompert and Richard L. Kugler

At the Battle of Gettysburg, Robert E. Lee made a mistake that doomed the hopes of the Confederate States of America to compel the United States to sue for peace. Why one of the great generals of his time made such a blunder continues to be a topic of research and intense debate. Lee said little at the time or afterward to justify his decision to launch what has become known as Pickett’s Charge, so analysis must be inferential and inconclusive. Our aim is to explain Lee’s fateful decision not with new facts but with new analytical methods to illuminate decisionmaking in combat.

Understanding how commanders draw on reason and experience to make sense of information, weigh alternatives, and make decisions in conditions of urgency and uncertainty is central to improving military performance in the fast, unfamiliar, “wired” warfare of the information age. Lee’s leadership of Confederate forces at Gettysburg constitutes a valuable case to study: the order of battle and technology of both sides are known in detail, and the terrain and troop movements have been studied thoroughly. Only the cause of Lee’s misjudgment remains elusive.

The pages that follow examine the facts that might have influenced Lee’s state of mind and his decision, offer and test alternative hypotheses on how he was thinking, draw conclusions, and apply those conclusions to matters of current interest.
Creating a NATO Special Operations Force

David C. Gompert and Raymond C. Smith

In the post-9/11 security environment, special operations forces (SOF) have proven indispensable. SOF units are light, lethal, mobile, and easily networked with other forces. While the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies have extensive SOF capabilities, these forces are not formally organized to collaborate with one another. There would be much to gain if U.S. and allied SOF trained to work together: national SOF assets would be improved, obstacles to effective combined operations would be removed, and a coherent Alliance capability would be readily available for NATO.

The Alliance can focus and grow its SOF capabilities by providing a selective and small combined “inner core” of NATO special operations forces for operations, while using an outer network to expand and improve SOF cooperation with interested allies.
Combating Opium in Afghanistan

Ali A. Jalali, Robert B. Oakley, and Zoe Hunter

Opium continues to pose one of the most serious threats to stability and good governance in Afghanistan. Proceeds and protection fees from trafficking are funneled to terrorist and insurgent groups, including the Taliban and al Qaeda. Insurgents have successfully leveraged poppy eradication efforts to increase popular resistance to both the government in Kabul and the presence of coalition forces. Despite major increases in counternarcotics programs and resources over the past year, production has shot up 59 percent.
Reforming Pentagon Strategic Decisionmaking

Christopher J. Lamb and Irving Lachow

This Strategic Forum analyzes the institutional challenges facing strategic decisionmaking within the U.S. Department of Defense and proposes reforms to improve how senior leaders make and support decisions. It highlights how existing processes — designed to be rational and methodical — are often undermined by bureaucratic stovepipes, consensus-oriented products, and limited integration of analytic support. The paper argues for the creation of a dedicated Decision Support Cell reporting directly to the Secretary of Defense to provide integrated rational analyses and to enhance intuitive decisionmaking through exercises and shared experience. By clarifying baseline assumptions, improving cross-bureaucratic collaboration, and balancing rational and intuitive elements, the proposed reforms aim to elevate the quality and coherence of strategic choices in peace and war. Effective decision support is framed as essential to aligning strategic agenda, planning, and resource allocation across the Pentagon.