Content

Report

Apr 13, 2016

Rebuilding societies: Strategies for resilience and recovery in times of conflict

By Manal Omar, Elie Abouaoun, Beatrice Pouligny

The forced displacement of unprecedented numbers of people within and beyond national borders has become an enduring yet fluid phenomenon across the Middle East and North Africa over the past decade.

Civil Society Conflict

Report

Mar 24, 2016

The Kremlin’s actions in Syria: Origins, timing, and prospects

By Frederic C. Hof, Vladislav Inozemtsev, Adam Garfinkle, Dennis Ross

Resolution to the conflict in Syria requires an understanding of the Russian intervention, involvement, and interest therein. Putin’s interest in regaining the “influence that the Soviet Union once enjoyed in the Middle East” shapes how the West must engage Russia, as Ambassador John E. Herbst highlights in The Kremlin’s Actions in Syria, a new report […]

Arms Control Conflict

Defense Industrialist

Feb 12, 2016

End draft registration

By James Hasik

Rather than mandating that women register, just terminate that useless practice. Should women be registered for the draft? Now that Defense Secretary Carter has removed the exclusion of women from all combat jobs, the Army chief of staff, the Marine Corps commandant, and Senator McCaskill of Missouri want all women registered. The secretary himself says that’s […]

Defense Policy Politics & Diplomacy

Defense Industrialist

Dec 31, 2015

Will the bomber always get through?

By James Hasik

The long-term survivability of the LRS-B is a known unknowable. Will the US Air Force’s new stealth bomber be sufficiently survivable? Naïve calculations sometimes presume, to quote Stanley Baldwin’s 1932 speech in the House of Commons, that “the bomber will always get through.” History has proven otherwise, and at the start of a ten-year development […]

Defense Industry Defense Policy

Defense Industrialist

Dec 17, 2015

Artificial strategy

By James Hasik

Are even the computers smart enough for the gray zones? General Joseph Votel, head of US Special Operations Command, is worried about “gray zones.” As he told the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities back in March, he is vexed by today’s “ambiguity on the nature of the conflict, the parties involved, and the […]

Defense Policy Security & Defense

Defense Industrialist

Dec 2, 2015

Bayonets, pistols, and JLTVs

By James Hasik

What three recent cases tell us about relative burdens in military procurement. Just the other day, I noted how outgoing Air Force procurement chief Bill LaPlante has been insisting that the Pentagon’s business of buying weapons has been improving over the past few years. Not everyone, however, is equally moved. On 18 November, at our […]

Defense Industry Defense Policy

Defense Industrialist

Nov 19, 2015

The Mistral will follow you

By James Hasik

Egypt’s procurement of helicopter carriers is truly strategic. As I wrote the other day, the Al-Baghdadi Gang has truly found tragic ways to combine brutality with stupidity. Attacking Russia and France in the same month, as Robert Pape of the University of Chicago wrote in the Boston Globe, is clearly an indication of desperation. Dealing with […]

Defense Policy France

Defense Industrialist

Nov 13, 2015

The LRS-B and nukes

By James Hasik and Rachel Rizzo

Does the Long-Range Strike Bomber need nuclear capability, and does nuclear capability need the LRS-B? Recapitalizing the air-breathing segment of the American nuclear triad has generally not been the US Air Force’s first argument for developing its new Long-Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B). Sustaining a global capacity for massive, repeated, marginally economical surgical strikes has long been the […]

Defense Policy Drones

Report

Nov 13, 2015

Japan’s security role and capabilities in the 2020s

By Roger Cliff

Security challenges in East Asia are becoming acute. North Korea is developing a missile-deliverable nuclear weapon, and the long-term stability of the Pyongyang regime is questionable. Taiwan, which Beijing claims as part of Chinese territory, is about to have a presidential election in which a candidate from a pro-independence party is the front-runner. China has […]

Defense Policy Japan

Defense Industrialist

Sep 23, 2015

A new New Look

By James Hasik

The West needs “a complete strategic rethink” of how it goes to war. In The Australian last November, David Kilcullen argued that “the West’s failed counter-terrorism strategy requires a complete rethink.” Set aside for the moment James Fallows’ screed in The Atlantic last December. Thirteen years of not-quite-winning two wars in the Middle East and South Asia, despite overwhelming material […]

Defense Policy Security & Defense

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