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Terrorist Sanctuary in the Sahara: A Case Study
Get PDFThe idea to deny sanctuary to terrorist groups lies at the heart of contemporary U.S. counterterrorism strategy. Violent extremist organizations in North Africa, most notably the group al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), have used remote and sparsely populated areas in the Sahara for protection from security forces to perform a range of activities such as training, planning, and logistics in order to conduct terrorist operations like kidnapping, murder, and bombing. Even after 16 years since the September 11 attacks and the resources dedicated to efforts to deny sanctuary, the concept of sanctuary remains largely unexplored. To deny sanctuary requires an understanding of what sanctuary is as an object and how sanctuary is used by terrorist organizations. This monograph proposes a functional understanding of sanctuary and offers fresh ideas to control sanctuary using a detailed case study of the most notorious of the North African terrorists, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, from his arrival to Mali in the late 1990s until the French intervention in early 2012. This multi-disciplinary inquiry utilizes a wide range of open-source documents as well as anthropological, sociological, and political science research, including interviews with one-time Belmokhtar hostage, Ambassador Robert Fowler, in order to construct a picture of what a day in the life of sanctuary-seeking terrorists is like. Belmokhtar and other violent groups remain active and at large in the Sahara in spite of a large French military presence, a small U.S. military presence, and local security forces conducting counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations. Additionally, the Islamic State movement could be viewed as the emergence of mega sanctuaries for terrorists and other violent extremist organizations. These threats require a new strategy to isolate, contain, or defeat terrorists and violent extremists in their sanctuary areas.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1402/thumbnail.jp
Still Soldiers and Scholars? An Analysis of Army Officer Testing
Get PDFStill Soldiers and Scholars? sheds light on a neglected aspect of talent management, namely, officer accessions testing and evaluation. It does so by tracing the history of officer testing since 1900, identifying and analyzing key developments in the assessment process, and then offering recommendations about how the Army should revise its approach to officer testing. This book supplements a series of monographs written by the Army’s Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis (OEMA) and published by the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) in 2009 and 2010. In those monographs, the authors proposed an officer corps strategy based on the theory of talent management. This book is a necessary first step in reforming the Army’s officer accessions effort in order to better align it with the Army’s talent-based approach to officer management.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1000/thumbnail.jp
Navigating the Third Offset Strategy
Get PDFThis article suggests adding a “craftsman” at lower ranks to steer private-sector projects through the Third Offset Strategy. This strategy was established by experienced leadership at the Pentagon to increase military acquisitions of automation and artificial intelligence technology
Parameters – Full Issue – Summer 2017
Get PDFThe Summer issue of Parameters opens with an essay by Sir Lawrence Freedman entitled “Beyond Surprise Attack.” Surprise, argues Freedman, can come in any number of forms, and sometimes those that come in the middle or end of a campaign prove the most decisive. Our first forum, Reevaluating Diplomatic & Military Power, offers two articles. The first, “What Are America’s Alliances Good For?” by Hal Brands and Peter Feaver, contends the costs and risks associated with America’s military alliances are frequently overstated, while at the same time the benefits are downplayed. Brands and Feaver, thus, provide a more accurate net assessment of America’s alliances in hopes of better informing current policy debates. In the second article, “Employing Military Force in the 21st Century,” Michael Matheny petitions US policymakers look to past uses of force for ways of employing force while managing the global and national violence threshold
21st-Century Challenges of Command: A View from the Field
Get PDFLeadership receives a tremendous amount of attention, but what about the day-to-day command challenges that confront O-4s, O-5s, and O-6s in today’s war zones? What has command entailed over the past decade and a half for special operations force (SOF) commanders who have deployed to Afghanistan (and Iraq) either to lead or to work under Special Operations Task Forces (SOTFs) or Combined Joint Special Operations Task Forces (CJSOTFs)? In both theaters, officers have had to contend with various competing hierarchies and significant churn. What then might the Army and military do to obviate or mitigate these and other problems? The contours of a potential solution are described and its benefits discussed.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1290/thumbnail.jp