UNSC Reform

The UN Security Council is among the multi-lateral institutions thatjust about everyone agrees needs to be reformed to better reflect theemerging influence of various “Second World” powers (e.g. Brazil,India, South Africa). There’s been talk of expanding its permanentmembers for the past ten years, but so far very little progress hasbeen made on articulating a solution that everyone finds acceptable. Onthe other hand, tons of progress has been made articulating thesolutions that everyone finds unacceptable, and today another draft proposal joined the reject pile. In their Century Foundation monograph (.pdf), Rising Powers and Global Institutions,G. John Ikenberry and Thomas Wright identify […]

NATO-EU Defense Fusion

There’s a lot going on in terms of European defense vis à vis NATO these days. France is considering integrating the alliance’s command structure while at the same time pushing hard for EU defense, an effort for which America NATO ambassador Victoria Nuland recently expressed support. Russia is offering historic contributions on both fronts. Now via DefenseNews comes this, from NATO chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, regarding EU defense: “I would like to see much more pooling of our capabilities, especially in areas such as vital enablers – transport, helicopters, or in research and development, or in harmonizing force structures […]

Deterring Terrorism

One of the significant differences between terrorist attacks and previous national security threats is the inability to deter them. So the thinking went, anyway, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. But the NY Times reports that American strategic planners are not only now questioning that assumption, they’re well into the effort of implementing some intitiatives with the goal of proving it wrong. Some of the initiatives mentioned in the article don’t seem to qualify as pure deterrence. Getting Islamic clerics to condemn suicide attacks on civilians, for instance, will certainly help dry up the pool of potential recruits, but it’s […]

Mohammed Rahim: High-Value Detainee, Low-Value News?

On Friday, the Pentagon announced that Mohammed Rahim, who had been captured last summer in Pakistan and held in the CIA black hole detention program since then, was transferred to GITMO’s high-value detainee wing. According to reports, Rahim was a high-level al Qaeda operative, part of Osama bin Laden’s inner circle, and personally responsible for bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora into Pakistan. The announcement confirms that the CIA detention program remains in operation, and adds some context to President Bush’s recent veto of Congress’ ban on the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other interrogation techniques. It also suggests, if […]

Defense Budget Sacred Cows

Lorelei Kelly has a post over at Democracy Arsenal taking aim at the sacred cows of the American defense budget that’s worth a read. I admit to being a missile defense skeptic myself, more for strategic reasons than for technological ones. Maybe I’m just a prisoner of a Cold War childhood, but the ABM Treaty always struck me as an island of reason in a MAD world. In passing, Kelly also takes a shot at growing the military by 90,000 troops, which seems to have passed from proposal to foregone conclusion. She wonders what we’re going to do with them. […]

De-fanging the Intelligence Watchdog

Yesterday I mentioned an Executive Order issued by President Bush a few weeks ago that essentially gutted the Intelligence Oversight Board but seemed to be flying under the radar. Today, via Kevin Drum, comes a Boston Globe article on the measure that suggests it just might have reached radar-tripping altitude.

PRT’s and the Civil-Military Blur

There’s been a lot of discussion of stabilization operations as part of the Army’s counterinsurgency posture lately, and of course the model around which consensus seems to be converging is that of the Provincial Reconstrution Teams. President Bush thinks they’re just swell, and in a video conference call with some teams operating in Afghanistan and Iraq today suggested that he wishes they’d been around when he was younger so he could have played hooky from a PRT instead of from the Texas Air Guard where he rode out the Vietnam War. (Okay, cheap shot, I know, but I couldn’t resist.) […]

The Ethics of Military Dissent

By an odd coincidence, yesterday when I was clearing out some bookmarks, I ran across this Army War College monograph on the ethics of military dissent that caught my eye back in February. The author, Don Snider, was writing in response to the Revolt of the Generals in 2006, when six retired generals publicly voiced their criticisms of the conduct of the Iraq War. But his argument seems applicable to Admiral William Fallon’s resignation as well (on which Thomas Barnett, the author of the Esquire profile, offers some final thoughts). Snider argues that the military’s strategic leaders must balance their […]

The Intelligence Wars

In a move that seems to have flown under the radar, President Bush issued an Executive Order on Friday, February 29, that transformed the Clinton-era President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board into the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. The White House maintained that the board maintains its independence under the new order, but as a general rule, it’s a safe bet to be skeptical of Executive Orders issued on a Friday. Most of the changes made to the board’s function remove the teeth from the board’s oversight capacity, thereby consolidating the White House’s control over intelligence oversight. One example is this clause, […]

The states parties to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention held two important meetings in 2007. First, national biological warfare experts met for several days in mid-August to exchange ideas about how best to counter this threat. Second, the states parties held their annual week-long gathering in December. Both of these sessions were remarkably non-confrontational as compared with previous years, suggesting that new political dynamics are now shaping the international politics of biological warfare and terrorism. The December 2006 Sixth Review Conference of the BTWC directed the member governments to focus on two main issues this year: (1) strengthening national […]

Learning From Turkey

I meant to mention this when I spotted it in the Turkish press, but this NY Times article is even more informative. In conjunction with Turkey’s ongoing military response to the PKK, PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan has just announced a $12 billion initiative aimed at addressing some of the socio-economic grievances of Turkey’s domestic Kurdish population. The move makes obvious political sense, and is part of a well-conceived diplomatic-military campaign against what Turkey perceives as a national security threat. I’ve thought for a while that America could draw some lessons from the way Turkey maneuvered its way towards achieving its […]

Fallon’s Dismissal: Insubordination in General, not Iran in Particular

Steve Clemons has good advice for the blogosphere and the press on the subject of Fallon’s firing: “Stop Hyperventilating: Fallon Fired, but Iran War Not Back On.” Indeed, all the evidence, including recent statements of the president himself, indicates that the administration is committed at the moment to use diplomatic and other non-military means to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions. All of the Internet speculation that Fallon’s dismissal signals a go on an Iran war strikes me as a sort of depraved wishful thinking by armchair pundits wishing for a good story to chew on. “By numerous accounts,” Clemons says, Bush […]

The Decline in Homegrown Terror

The LA Times has got a fascinating article on the decline of homegrown American terror groups in the post-9/11 era. This paragraph alone is worth the price of admission: John Trochmann, once an omnipresent face of hatred for the government, still has the iron-gray beard and fiery eyes from the days when he helped found the Militia of Montana. Today he drives a 13-year-old black Suburban to gun shows in the Pacific Northwest to hawk anti-government pamphlets or sell log cabins to get by. He still believes, but at 64, he doesn’t act. “9/11,” he said in an interview at […]

Silver Star

Something else quietly being changed by the nature of the engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan is the role of women in the military: Army Spc. Monica Lin Brown saved the lives of fellow soldiers after a roadside bomb tore through a convoy of Humvees in the eastern Paktia province in April 2007, the military said. After the explosion, which wounded five soldiers in her unit, Brown ran through insurgent gunfire and used her body to shield wounded comrades as mortars fell less than 100 yards away, the military said. . . Pentagon policy prohibits women from serving in frontline combat […]

Rousing Religious Passions Against Peace

It is hard to overstate the impact of the latest terrorist attack in Jerusalem, where a lone gunman managed to enter a religious school to kill eight students and wound nine others on Thursday evening. Israeli commentators were quick to highlight that by targeting the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva, which is regarded as the flagship institution of the religious Zionist movement, the attack was clearly intended “to outrage the general public and to inflame that particular segment of it most skeptical of the possibility of Israel one day coming to terms with its most immediate Arab neighbors.” News of the attack […]

Subsidizing EADS

Really, the more I read about the Air Force tanker contract, the better the deal looks for EADS. Basically, EADS will be building commercial Airbus A330’s and handing them off to Northrop Grumman for the sensitive mil tech upgrades that will make them USAF compatible. In other words, in addition to the European subsidies it already enjoys as a semi-national enterprise, EADS will now also be receiving a de facto American subsidy (ie. a guaranteed order for 179 planes) to establish a productive beachhead in the dollar zone. And with the Euro at a buck-fifty and climbing, that $600 mil […]

Fallon Gets Bashful

Apparently Centcom commander Admiral William Fallon has distanced himself from Thomas Barnett’s glowing Esquire profile. That’s probably because by contrasting Fallon’s clear-sighted strategic vision with the war goggles through which the Bush adminstration is viewing the region, it probably raised the temperature a few degrees on the Admiral’s hot seat. Too bad, because Fallon really does seem to have a folk wisdom about how to handle some of the region’s trouble spots that in its simplicity offers more substance than some of the more soaring diplomatic initiatives I’ve seen proposed elsewhere. Here he is on Iran: “Tehran’s feeling pretty cocky […]

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