Defense & Security Archive

In December, with a dispute over oil-transit fees between Sudan and South Sudan exacerbating already tense post-independence relations, the world looked to China to save the day. Beijing sent Special Envoy Liu Guijin to negotiations in Addis Ababa in the hopes of brokering a deal on oil revenues and facilitating a final post-independence settlement between the two sides. A month later, the crisis between and within the two Sudans continues. But the episode raises the question of whether China’s evolving Sudan policy reflects a broader evolution in its approach to African and international diplomacy. China’s current relations with the two […]

This video shows experiments performed with a team of nano quadrotors at the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania. It shows advances in the capabilities of miniature Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and may prompt questions about how advanced air defense systems could defend against them.

On Nov. 26, NATO helicopters killed 26 Pakistani soldiers at Pakistan’s Salala checkpoint, mistakenly believing them to be Taliban militants. The incident provoked a furious reaction from Pakistan’s military and civilian leadership as well as from the population at large. In what was already shaping up to be one of the worst years ever for U.S.-Pakistan relations, the Salala incident represented the final straw. Pakistan immediately shut down NATO’s supply lines, ordered an end to U.S. drone strikes in Pakistani territory and boycotted the Bonn Conference on Afghan reconciliation. Shortly thereafter, Pakistan’s Parliamentary Committee on National Security (PCNS) began a […]

Immediately following World War II, the United States undertook a complete restructuring of its foreign policy apparatus. The 1947 National Security Act redesigned the national security bureaucracy of the United States, giving birth to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense and the United States Air Force. This redesign was necessary because the United States had taken on a global role during World War II, one that the extant bureaucratic structure was insufficient to manage. The title of Dean Acheson’s memoir of his tenure as secretary of state from 1949 to 1953, “Present at the Creation,” captured this moment […]

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez last month appointed as defense minister a general allegedly linked to a Colombian rebel group, raising concerns that the move might jeopardize the two countries’ recent thaw in relations. In an email interview, Adam Isacson, senior associate for regional security at the Washington Office on Latin America, discussed the Colombia-Venezuela security relationship. WPR: What have security relations between Colombia and Venezuela been like historically? Adam Isacson: The two northern Andean countries have never gone to war. But relations, while cordial, have never been fully trustful. Things took a turn for the worse in the past decade, […]