Defense & Security Archive

After 20 months of negotiations, which came down to the wire over 18 straight days in Vienna, Iran and six world powers, led by the United States, reached a deal Tuesday to curb Iran’s nuclear program for more than a decade in exchange for lifting sanctions that have crippled the Iranian economy. All U.S. and European Union nuclear-related sanctions will be suspended after international inspectors have verified that Iran is abiding by its commitments. According to The New York Times, “the United States preserved—and in some cases extended—the nuclear restrictions it sketched out with Iran in early April in Lausanne, […]

Several weeks ago, the U.S. Army quietly killed a program called the Human Terrain System. Created at the height of American counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the program deployed teams of social scientists to conduct highly focused cultural research and advise U.S. military commanders on how to use this knowledge to work more effectively with local populations. While saddled with many problems, particularly early on, the Human Terrain System ultimately complemented traditional intelligence and helped beleaguered U.S. military forces understand the human environment where they fought and worked. Still, the program’s cancellation created only a brief ripple among Washington […]

In 1925, Syrians rose up against their French colonial authorities. The revolt started in southern Syria, in the rugged homeland of the Druze, an esoteric religious sect with roots in Shiite Islam. Druze rebels near the town of Suwayda shot down a French surveillance plane, and before long a full-scale rebellion spread to Damascus and farther north, led by a Druze leader, Sultan al-Atrash, who became a nationalist hero in Syria. Nearly 90 years later, the Syrian uprising that began in 2011 also got its spark in southern Syrian—not in the Druze homeland, but in the dusty border town of […]

George Clemenceau, who as prime minister of France presided over the final year of World War I, once famously said that war was too important to be left to the generals. If the Pentagon’s recently released National Military Strategy (NMS), penned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is any indication, the generals should be left pretty far away from strategy, too. This year’s NMS, the first since 2011, is a typical farrago of threat-inflation, strategic incoherence and “a glass half-empty” conception of 21st-century international affairs, lubricated by the oft-heard notion from inside the Pentagon that the U.S military “must provide […]

Last month, Indian special operations forces conducted a brief raid into Myanmar looking for militants. In an email interview, Iskander Rehman, a nonresident fellow at the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council, discussed India’s special operations forces. WPR: How developed are India’s special operations forces, and what are their principal capabilities? Iskander Rehman: That’s a difficult question to answer, in part because some of India’s special operations forces (SOF) units may bear a closer resemblance to what Western military analysts would consider to be elite and/or specialized infantry than to special operators. Within the Indian army, for example, there […]

On June 30, the Pentagon issued the latest iteration of the National Military Strategy (NMS) of the United States. The new version, the first update to the strategy since 2011, depicts today’s international security environment as being more challenging for the United States due to the unprecedented reach of globalization, the diffusion of military technologies and the rise of revisionist great powers. The NMS establishes U.S. military objectives and explains how the Pentagon will achieve them. It describes the overall global security environment in which the U.S. military operates as well as the threats and opportunities that affect U.S. national […]

In March, Sweden abruptly decided not to renew a five-year defense industry cooperation deal with Saudi Arabia, amid a diplomatic spat after Sweden’s foreign minister criticized Riyadh over its human rights record. The controversy led to headlines around the world and exposed the tension for Sweden, the world’s 12th-largest arms exporter, between promoting global defense sales and advancing democracy and human rights. But this is far from a new issue for Stockholm, and given the worsening security climate in Europe, the Saudi episode is unlikely to change minds in Sweden about the need to export defense equipment, even to non-democracies. […]

If ambitious aliens reached Earth tomorrow, they might conclude that the planet is too troublesome to bother conquering: The world looks like an ungovernable place. The European Union faces an ever-intensifying crisis over Greece. Arab powers and their Western allies are struggling to keep up with terrorist attacks and atrocities by the Islamic State. The U.S. military reported last week that Russian and Chinese assertiveness now makes the chance of great-power war “low but growing.” Can these crises be defused? The answer may lie in Vienna, where talks on an Iranian nuclear deal are coming to a head, after widely […]

With water scarcity increasing political tension and threatening economic instability in countries across the world, transboundary water disputes often become highly charged and bitterly divisive. A prominent example has been the Nile basin in northeast Africa, where the nations sharing the Nile’s waters have for years sparred over their usage allotments amid concerns that upstream countries may interfere with water flow into downstream countries. Most recently, the region’s flashpoint for transboundary water conflict has been Ethiopia’s construction of the Grand Renaissance Dam, which within several years will stretch across the Blue Nile at the Ethiopian-Sudanese border. The controversial project has […]

Last month the United Nations released a policy paper, “Uniting our Strengths for Peace,” on the future of peacekeeping. Written by a panel of 16 experts, including former East Timor President Jose Ramos Horta, the report is a subtly subversive summary of the current problems with U.N. peace operations. To further explore this subject, World Politics Review partnered with the Global Dispatches podcast to produce this interview with WPR columnist Richard Gowan. Gowan and host Mark Leon Goldberg discuss U.N. peacekeeping, the challenges it faces and how current trends in global security will force the U.N. to adapt. For more […]

Last Friday, as America was focused on landmark Supreme Court rulings that made same-sex marriage legal and prevented millions of citizens from losing their health insurance, the so-called Islamic State (IS) flexed its terrorist muscles. The impact was as horrific as one might imagine. In Tunisia, a Kalashnikov-toting jihadist gunman shot and killed 39 Western tourists sunbathing on a resort beach. In Kuwait, a suicide bomber blew himself up at a Shiite mosque, killing 27 worshippers and wounding 227. And in France, in an attack whose motivations remain unclear but that bore all the hallmarks of IS, the head of […]