Defense & Security Archive

On March 4, Azerbaijan’s breakaway enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh became a scene of one of the most controversial attacks there since a May 1994 ceasefire, which established a no war, no peace situation in the region. The conflict started in 1988, when the predominantly Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh stated its intention to secede from Azerbaijan. The resulting war caused severe casualties and massive population displacement on both sides. Azerbaijan lost control over the majority of Nagorno-Karabakh’s territory and the adjacent seven regions. Although the Nagorno-Karabakh republic currently enjoys de-facto independence, no country has recognized it as an independent entity. Despite decade-long […]

The recent decline in violence in Iraq is not synonymous with progress in the war on terror. Instead, the debate over the success of the Iraq surge strategy is a dangerous distraction from the “long, hard slog” that awaits us in the fight against violent extremism. Four-and-a-half years ago, then-U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used that phrase to refer to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in a notorious 2003 memo titled “Global War on Terror.” In that same internal dispatch, Rumsfeld also stated that “we lack the metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war […]

After two months of post-election turmoil, which claimed up to 1,500 lives and displaced more than half a million people, Kenya is slowly recovering from civil strife. A power-sharing deal between erstwhile rivals President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga seems to have pulled the east African country from the brink of a civil war. The United States and other donors are sinking millions of dollars into the implementation of the deal, which will make Odinga an executive prime minister and give him two deputies. But the heart-on-the-sleeve moments that greeted the deal — especially from Odinga’s side — […]

BEDDAWI, Lebanon — Nael Abu Siam is struggling to keep reality at bay for his children. Ten months ago, his home was destroyed in a conflict between Lebanese soldiers and radical Islamic militants at the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon. “First I told them that nothing has changed, just that we change houses to repair the first one,” said the 40-year Palestinian refugee. But as the months have gone by, the pretext has become more difficult to sustain. The members of the Siam family are among 33,000 Palestinian refugees displaced from their homes by the conflict at Nahr […]

On March 6, President George W. Bush delivered a major speech on homeland security to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The President thanked DHS employees for their hard work and recounted some of the department’s recent achievements. Bush also warned against complacency: “We must also remember that the danger to our country has not passed. Since the attacks of 9/11, the terrorists have tried to strike our homeland again and again.” In an op-ed published on the same day, Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff, the former and current DHS secretary, also claimed that during […]

The news of Venezuelan tanks and troops massing along the border with Colombia must have old Latin revolutionaries sighing with nostalgia. It is as if the old days of idealistic dreams, when every bearded university student was a would-be Ché Guevara, had never left; as if someone had conjured back those old days filled with utopian possibilities. You have to hand it to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, a character straight out of a García Márquez novel. Chávez would not countenance a hundred years of revolutionary solitude. Instead, the man with the power to stop the clock and wind it back […]

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico – Despite a number of significant steps to increase security along the U.S.-Mexican border in recent years, violence along the frontier is growing as Mexican drug cartels increase their involvement in human and drug smuggling into the United States. Meanwhile, a Bush administration initiative to provide significant law enforcement aid to Mexico is stalled in Congress amid old questions about the best way to fight the drug war. Since 2001, the Bush administration has increased the number of border patrol agents from 9,000 to 15,000, with another 3,000 to be added by the time Bush leaves office. […]

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — The death of FARC commander Raúl Reyes is being seen here as a significant turning point in Colombia’s internal armed conflict with Latin America’s oldest insurgency, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. While the killing of Reyes on Ecuadorian soil has sparked a diplomatic crisis between Colombia and its neighbors, it is the impact of his death on the country’s conflict that will be noted in the annals of Colombian history. Colombian President Álvaro Uribe was elected to power with a mandate to crush the rebels. For the last six years, the government’s counterinsurgency campaign, bankrolled largely […]

MIAMI — The specter of war looming over Colombia and Venezuelafollowing the recent killing of a Colombian rebel leader comes amid anongoing and significant increase in Venezuela’s military spending inrecent years. Venezuela’s military buildup and continuing concernsabout its government’s ties to left-wing rebels provide aworrying context for Venezuela’s recent troop mobilization, though mostanalysts still believe the chances are slim that the current crisiswill spark a military conflict.Colombia’s decision over the weekend to cross into Ecuador to kill rebel leader Raúl Reyes and 16 members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who were reportedly camped just a mile from […]

The Israeli experience in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 should warn Americans against having an Army that has become so focused on irregular and counterinsurgency warfare that it can no longer fight large battles against a conventional enemy. In an important essay in the Journal of Strategic Studies, Israeli scholar Avi Kober recently noted that years of policing by the Israeli Army in its territories had degraded its ability to fight the Hezbollah enemy that used conventional tactics. The result was a significant battlefield defeat for the Israeli Army. The American Army is in a similar condition today, and […]

The formal acceptance of the new U.S. Coast Guard National Security Cutter Bertholf, slated for last week, was supposed to be good news for the nation’s troubled fifth military service. Instead, the 5,000-ton ship — the largest and potentially most powerful vessel in Coast Guard history — has become another chapter in the mounting scandal surrounding the service’s $25-billion Deepwater modernization program. Deepwater, launched in 2002, aims to build new ships and airplanes and connect them all with a secure, electronic command-and-control network using common components. In recent years, the 50,000-strong Coast Guard has been buffeted by a rapidly aging […]