CSR Policy Briefs

Printing is not supported at the primary Gallery Thumbnail page. Please first navigate to a specific Image before printing.

Switch View to Grid View Slideshow

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.
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.
The Absence of Europe: Implications for International Security?

Steven Philip Kramer

In the face of economic and military difficulties, the next U.S. administration will likely return to a more multilateral foreign policy. It will look favorably on working with international organizations. It will focus on greater cooperation with allies. Above all, it will turn to Europe.
Energy Security in South Asia: Can Interdependence Breed Stability?

Joseph McMillan

Despite possessing nearly a quarter of the world’s population, South Asia has long been a backwater in terms of global economic clout, accounting for less than 3 percent of worldwide gross domestic product (GDP). In the last two decades, however, the economic stagnation that has historically characterized the region has been overcome, thanks to significant policy shifts, so that the subcontinent is now the locus of some of the fastest growth in the world. India has led the way, averaging over 8 percent real growth over the last 5 years, but Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka have also been sustaining rates of 6 percent or more since 2005. The rise of South Asia in general and India in particular as a force on the economic scene is now almost universally recognized.
Defense Transformation à la française and U.S. Interests

Leo G. Michel

French President Nicolas Sarkozy pledged that France “will remain a great military power” when he unveiled the White Book on Defense and National Security and endorsed its wide-ranging reforms.² The next day, a group of anonymous general officers condemned it as an “amateurish” and “incoherent” exercise that “cannot mask the downgrading of our military in a more dangerous world,” and former conservative Prime Minister Alain Juppé criticized Sarkozy’s intention to enhance France’s role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as a “fool’s bargain.”³
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.
Challenges to Persian Gulf Security: How Should the United States Respond?

Judith S. Yaphe

For the United States, any consideration of Persian Gulf security must begin with Iran: its ambitions, perceptions, and behavior. For many in the West, Winston Churchill’s famous quip about the Soviet Union—being a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma—could apply equally well to Iran given its complex, opaque, and often turbulent politics. And yet the key to understanding Iran is to figure out what it sees when it looks in the mirror. What are the fundamental influences that shape Iran’s view of its role in the world?
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 bureaucratic, cultural, and tactical differences threaten to hinder progress. Multilateral counterterrorism cooperation is inherently difficult because the degree of threat perception and capabilities to fight terrorism vary significantly among the different actors. Even if Americans and Europeans agree on the need to fight global terrorism, especially after clear evidence (for example, the 9/11, 3/11, and 7/7 terrorist attacks), there may be a lack of consensus on the mix of causal or aggravating factors, as well as what steps to take to overcome those factors. One thing that everyone does seem to agree on is that this is a fight no country can undertake alone.
Can Deterrence Be Tailored?

M. Elaine Bunn

North Korea’s nuclear weapons test is only the latest illustration of how dramatically the international security environment has changed over the last 15 years. Given the wider variety of actors that could inflict mass casualties upon the United States, its allies, or its interests, it makes sense to explore whether and how deterrence could be adapted, adjusted, and made to fit 21st-century challenges.
Trans-American Security: What’s Missing?

Luigi R. Einaudi

World politics are at once globalizing and fragmenting.¹ The world’s only superpower, the United States, is focused so intensely on Iraq that its attention elsewhere sometimes wanders. The other major powers—China, the European Union, India, Japan, and Russia—are deeply immersed in domestic concerns, international economic competition, and their immediate neighborhoods. Latin America and the Caribbean continue to seek their place on the world stage but are torn internally over how to overcome the injustices and social exclusion that hamper their progress.
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
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

With the collapse of Iraq’s Ba’thist government in 2003, the United States appeared to be in a position to shape the country’s political direction and establish a civil society. Despite Iraq’s record of serious political violence, especially Saddam Hussein’s repression of Kurdish and Shi’a populations at the end of the war with Iran and after the abortive rebellions of 1991, the turmoil had never taken the form of outright intersectarian warfare. There was at least some reason to hope that such warfare could be avoided in the post-Saddam transition as well, and indeed that was the case—for a while. Initially, the need for Kurd and Arab, Sunni and Shi’a, to establish bases of power and lines of authority in the nascent political process masked communal unease. Early attempts by Sunni extremists and renegade Ba’thists to provoke violence and civil war were unsuccessful. At that moment, America’s ability to influence nationbuilding and create a more equitable and secure country was at its greatest.
Combating Opium in Afghanistan

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

Opium poses an enormous threat to stability and good governance in Afghanistan.¹ President Hamid Karzai put it well: “If we don’t destroy poppy, it will destroy us.”² However, the counternarcotics challenge is not one that the government of Afghanistan has been prepared to meet thus far.
Reforming Pentagon Strategic Decisionmaking

Christopher J. Lamb and Irving Lachow

The recent 2006 Department of Defense Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) Report to Congress gives a surprising prominence to decisionmaking reform. Prior to the 2006 QDR Report, Pentagon leaders thought reforms they made between 2001 and 2005 were sufficient to produce major shifts in military capabilities that would move the Department of Defense (DOD) into the 21st century.¹ Yet by the time Pentagon leaders finished the report, they believed strategic decisionmaking reforms were one of only two fundamental imperatives for DOD to emerge from the QDR (the other being the need to continue efforts to reorient military capabilities toward new threats).²
Southeast Asian Security Challenges: America’s Response?

Marvin C. Ott

The security situation in Southeast Asia is remarkably complex, with multiple forces and trends emanating from within the region and impacting it from without. The forces at work fall into two broad categories. One involves globalized, transnational, and multinational factors, such as rapid economic change with profound implications for political stability; the sudden emergence of militant jihadist networks that have mounted violent attacks against the political and cultural status quo in much of the region; and transnational environmental and health issues typified by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic and current concerns regarding avian flu. Second, the dramatic growth in Chinese power (economic, military, and diplomatic) confronts the region with a situation familiar to traditional geopolitics. Both Chinese policy and some regional responses (notably those of Singapore) reflect a sophisticated understanding of the nuances of classic realpolitik.
Visions of Order: Japan and China in U.S. Strategy

James J. Przystup and Phillip C. Saunders

The search for order has long challenged diplomats and statesmen. Today’s liberal international economic and political order has evolved out of a century of conflict, revolution, and war into a pattern of interestbased cooperation among the world’s great powers. The international system, however, is not a self-regulating mechanism; maintenance of order, once established, requires the active and full participation of major powers with high stakes in the effective functioning of the system.
China, Russia and the Balance of Power in Central Asia

Eugene B. Rumer

Since the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) called upon the United States to commit to withdraw its military personnel from Central Asia at its July 2005 summit, the SCO has acquired the reputation as a significant obstacle to U.S. policy. However, this reputation obscures the real state of affairs. Notwithstanding press reports about the challenge posed by the SCO to U.S. policy in Central Asia, a close look at the organization, the behavior of its members, their motivations, and the practical impact of their declarations suggests that the SCO’s challenge to U.S. interests and policies in Central Asia is less than meets the eye.
Restructuring Special Operations Forces for Emerging Threats

David Tucker and Christopher J. Lamb

Special Operations Forces (SOF) are vital for combating terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. SOF prominence in these missions has only grown since September 11, 2001, when the Nation realized its unprecedented power did not shield it from devastating unconventional attacks. While SOF are consumed by their operations in the war on terror, national leaders need to acknowledge neither Washington nor U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) is organized for optimal use of SOF.
Constabulary Forces and Postconflict Transition: The Euro-Atlantic Dimension

David T. Armitage Jr. and Anne M. Moisan

Since the early 1990s, multinational stabilization efforts in the wake of conflicts or major natural disasters have repeatedly encountered problems in filling the so-called security gap. In places such as Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, outside interveners have faced a compelling need to use specialized capabilities that can fill the gap between the point where military operations—whether for combat, peacekeeping, or counterinsurgency—leave off and community-based policing activities pick up. In particular, ensuring a capacity to manage and defuse civil disturbances and other threats to public order has become a sine qua non for overall mission success.¹
U.S.-Australia Alliance Relations: An Australian View

Paul Dibb

Australia is America’s oldest friend and ally in the Asia-Pacific region. The two countries fought alongside each other in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the 1991 Gulf War, and most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq. The closeness of the two nations today is without precedent in the history of the relationship. Australia is now America’s second closest ally in the world, after the United Kingdom.
Sustaining U.S.-European Global Security Cooperation

Stephen J. Flanagan

Many on both sides of the Atlantic hope that European-American relations will resume a more civil and cooperative course in the aftermath of differences over Iraq. President George W. Bush’s visit to Europe in February 2005 and subsequent initiatives suggest that restoring transatlantic security cooperation will be a priority of the administration. Given the acrimony in official exchanges and the vilification in popular media over the past 2 years, not to mention lingering differences over strategy and policy, the wounds will not heal quickly. If both sides take steps to enhance consultations and are willing to make policy adjustments, however, there is hope for fashioning complementary and even some common European and American approaches to critical transatlantic and global security issues.
Insurgency: Modern Warfare Evolves into a Fourth Generation

T.X. Hammes

On May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush declared the end of major combat in Iraq. While most Americans rejoiced at this announcement, students of history understood that it simply meant the easy part was over. In the following months, peace did not break out, and the troops did not come home. In fact, Iraqi insurgents have struck back hard. Instead of peace, each day Americans read about the death of another soldier, the detonation of deadly car bombs, the assassination of civilians, and Iraqi unrest.
The Arab-Israeli Conflict: Toward an Equitable and Durable Solution

Aaron David Miller

In any discussion of U.S. policy toward the Arab-Israeli issue, honest debate and clarity are essential. During my nearly 25 years of advising 6 U.S. secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations, 3 basic propositions have been relevant throughout, including during these last 4 years when everything that right-thinking Arabs, Israelis, and Americans worked to achieve seemed to be battered down or broken.
Deploying Missile Defense: Major Operational Challenges

M. Elaine Bunn

If all goes according to plan, by the end of 2004, the United States will deploy eight ground-based midcourse defense (GMD) interceptors¹ in Alaska and California, along with land-, sea-, and space-based sensors and the command and control systems to support the interceptors. By the end of 2005, 12 more GMD interceptors will be added, along with additional sensors and interceptor missiles on Navy ships.