Occasional Papers

Follow

• 

  Weathering the Storm: Leading Your Organization Through a Pandemic

  Stephen Prior, Robert E. Armstrong, Ford Rowan, and Mary Beth Hill-Harmon

  This document is a guide to help prepare your organization for survival during a pandemic. All organizations have their own culture and character, so no one easy-to-follow guide will provide all the answers for your specific group. Rather, this is designed to provide you with resource materials from which you may pick and choose to tailor a plan that is best suited to your circumstances.

• 

  Cooperative Crisis Management and Avian Influenza: A Risk Assessment Guide for International Contagious Disease Prevention and Risk Mitigation

  Donald F. Thompson and Renata P. Louie

  This paper proposes a risk assessment and mitigation strategy designed to give both national authorities and international organizations the diagnostic took needed to evaluate preparedness, identify country-level weaknesses, and prioritize scarce resources to combat avian influenza.

• 

  An ICT Primer: Information and Communication Technologies for Civil-Military Coordination in Disaster Relief and Stabilization and Reconstruction

  Larry Wentz

  This primer presents current knowledge and best practices in creating a collaborative, civil-military, information environment to support data collection, communications, collaboration, and information-sharing needs in disaster situations and complex emergencies.

• 

  Harnessing the Interagency for Complex Operations

  Neyla Arnas, Charles L. Barry, and Robert B. Oakley

  This paper attempts to catalogue and describe the known models for interagency cooperation for stabilization and reconstruction (S&R) operations. The models in existence and under discussion can be grouped in terms of their focus on different aspects of the interagency process, as well as on different aspects of S&R.

• 

  The NATO Response Force: Facilitating Coalition Warfare Through Technology Transfer and Information Sharing

  Jeffrey P. Bialos and Stuart L. Koehl

  This study is an examination of the issues associated with transferring U.S. technology and information needed for standing up such an advanced force for early entry into high-intensity conflicts. It also makes a number of additional observations about the nature of 21st century coalition warfighting, the centrality of network-centric warfare to coalition operations, and the importance and complexity of improving force interoperability in an increasingly network-centric environment.

• 

  Transforming the Reserve Component: Four Essays

  Hans Binnendijk; Michael J, Baranick; Raymond E. Bell; Gina Cordero; Stephen M. Duncan; Christopher Holshek; and Larry Wentz

  This volume contains four essays on various aspects of the Reserve Component published at a time when Reserves are serving overseas at historically high rates and when new missions like homeland security demand their attention. In these essays, the authors explore ways in which the Reserve Component might be transformed to face these challenges.

• 

  Critical Technology Events in the Development of the Abrams Tank: Project Hindsight Revisited

  Richard Chait, John W. Lyons, and Duncan Long

  This paper consists of a series of studies focusing on Army weapons systems, beginning with the mainstay of the Army’s armor force, the Abrams tank. Analysis of other Army systems, such as the Apache helicopter and the Javelin and Stinger missiles will follow. The results of all studies are complied in a wrap-up report that will focus on the implications of the findings for today’s S&T environment.

• 

  The Science and Technology Innovation Conundrum

  Timothy Coffey, Jill P. Dahlburg, and Elihu Zimet

  This study is motivated by the observation that the state of health of the United States S&T enterprise seems to be simultaneously characterized by opposite assessments. The purpose of this study is to shed light on how this conundrum has come about, and from this perspective to evaluate potential impacts of the underlying drivers of the conundrum on the technological positioning and ultimate national security of the U.S.

• 

  Container Security: A Proposal for a Comprehensive Code of Conduct

  Ola Dahlman, Jenifer Mackby, Bernard Sitt, Andre Poucet, Arend Meerburg, Bernard Massinon, Edward Ifft, Masahiko Asada, and Ralph Alewine

  This paper recommends the development and adoption of a comprehensive Code of Conduct that would be globally recognized and enforced for the improved security in the shipping trade, including some procedures on containers, which has become an important component of global commerce.

• 

  Can al Qaeda Be Deterred from Using Nuclear Weapons?

  Lewis A. Dunn

  The use of a nuclear weapon would be the ultimate al Qaeda terrorist outrage. Over the past decade, however, the prevailing assessment of the likelihood of terrorist acquisition and use of nuclear (specifically), biological, chemical, or radiological (NBC/R) weapons has been reversed.1 In the 1990s, most policymakers and analysts were highly skeptical of warnings of terrorist use of these weapons. Today, the widespread assumption is that al Qaeda’s acquisition of NBC/R weapons would be rapidly followed by their use—that is, employment via the release of an agent, the dispersal of radiological materials, or the detonation of a nuclear explosive. This paper explores that proposition. In so doing, it seeks to illuminate the conditions and calculations that could shape al Qaeda’s posture regarding employment of NBC/R weapons, as well as to highlight possible contributions to the overall U.S. war on terror “at the margin” of deterrence.

• 

  Iraq and After: Taking the Right Lessons for Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction

  Michael Eisenstadt

  Recent proliferation surprises in the Middle East—the failure to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, Libya’s decision to eliminate its WMD, and evidence of significant progress by Iran toward a nuclear weapons capability—underscore the need for the nonproliferation community to reassess some of its key assumptions about WMD proliferation and the nature of the evolving international landscape.
  
  Such a reassessment must be highly speculative. Much about Iraq’s WMD programs is likely to remain a mystery due to the destruction of records and the looting of facilities following the fall of Baghdad, as well as the continuing silence of many Iraqi weapons scientists and former government officials.¹ Likewise, the calculations driving key proliferationrelated decisions by Libya and Iran remain murky. This lack of knowledge, however,should not inhibit attempts to grasp the implications of these developments for U.S. nonproliferation and counterproliferation policy.

• 

  Pre-Conflict Management Tools: Winning the Peace

  Aaron B. Frank

  This paper addresses the Pre-Conflict Management Tools (PCMT) Program which was developed to transform how intelligence, policy, and operational decisionmakers interact when confronting highly complex strategic problems. The first half of this paper provides readers a context for why the PCMT program is important for incorportating social science models into the RCC and interagency planning processes. The second half provides an overview of the structure, methods, and technologies of PCMT.

• 

  Battle-Wise: Gaining Advantage in Networked Warfare

  David C. Gompert, Irving Lachow, and Justin Perkins

  This paper summarizes a forthcoming National Defense University book suggesting why and how the U.S. and allied forces should improve the cognitive faculties of military decisionmakers to attain new operational and strategic advantages or to avoid the loss of advantages they now enjoy.

• 

  Learning from Darfur: Building a Net-Capable African Force to Stop Mass Killing

  David C. Gompert, Courtney Richardson, Clifford H. Bernath, and Richard L. Kugler

  The purpose of this report is to explore one particularly promising model of combat force to intervene in Africa to stop mass killings and other atrocities. Its conclusion is that networking concepts and technologies that were effective in Afghanistan and Iraq can be used by Africans with intensive external help to field a capability for forcible humanitarian intervention.

• 

  Alternative Fleet Architecture Design

  Stuart E. Johnson and Arthur K. Cebrowski

  This report calls into question the viability of the longstanding logic of naval force building. It provides a description of the opportunities that rapid advances in technology and organizational effectiveness offer the U.S. Navy as it looks to the demanding future. Most important, it provides an alternative fleet architecture design that incorporates the three broad elements of the DoD’s transformation strategy.

• 

  Strengthening the Army R&D Program

  John W. Lyons, Joseph N. Mait, and Dennis R. Schmidt

  These two papers consider models for managing the Army laboratories, including the mode of operations and the means by which the Army can be assured that its technical enterprise is state of the art. Taken together these papers present opportunities to move the Army S&T program ahead without disrupting the current operations of the laboratories.

• 

  Making IT Happen: Transforming Military Information Technology

  Joseph N. Mait

  This report is a primer for commercial providers to gain some understanding of the military’s thinking about military information technology and some of the programs it foresees for the future. The intent is to introduce those not presently involved in the development of military information technology to some of the things and programs being developed by the DoD for deployment in the next five to ten years.

• 

  A Primer on the Detection of Nuclear and Radiological Weapons

  Gary W. Phillips, David J. Nagel, and Timothy Coffey

  This study upon which this report is based was undertaken because of the large and growing importance of detection technologies for nuclear or radiological weapons of mass destruction (NRWMD). While this report will focus on detection of NRWMD, the NRWMD problem does not have a purely technical solution and th reasons for this will be become clear in this report.

• 

  The Bug Stops Here: Force Protection and Emerging Infectious Diseases

  Donald F. Thompson, Joel L. Swerdlow, and Cheryl Loeb

  The purpose of this paper is to review important lessons that have been learned in the past, and to revisit the older but proven principles of force protection that are in danger of being forgotten in today’s technology-focused military environment. It provides a series of case studies that analyze health threats to each regional combatant command and presents both tactical and strategic recommendations that will better prepare the entire DoD for future outbreaks.

• 

  Eliminating Adversary WMD: What's at Stake?

  Rebecca K.C. Hersman

  The failure to find substantial evidence of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons in Iraq has exposed serious weaknesses in the U.S. understanding of the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) threat posed by its adversaries as well as in its ability to deal effectively with these threats. A rancorous and highly politicized debate, primarily about the intelligence assessments of Iraqi WMD capabilities before Operation Iraqi Freedom, has dominated national discussion for months. Unfortunately, the current preoccupation with intelligence might mask other issues and shortcomings in the American ability to eliminate the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction in the hands of its enemies.
  

• 

  Shedding Light on the Battlefield: Tactical Applications of Photonic Technology

  Joseph N. Mait, Michael W. Haney, Keith W. Goossen, and Mark P. Christensen

  This paper addresses the growing availiability and dependence on tactical sensor technology on bandwidth for the battlfield and recommends the use of light, or photons, to transmit information. It highlights the advantages of photonics in three applications and discusses the economical and technological advantages for increasing the use of photonics for the U.S. government and military.