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A New Army Air Force
No full textΑfter 75 years, it is time. The U.S. Army needs its own airplanes for sound reasons that deserve careful consideration. This bold assertion should draw a strong reaction from Airmen, but the simple truth is that close air support (CAS) for the Army runs counter to everything an independent, strategic air force stands for. In war after war, bitter inter-Service rivalry recurs over the use of airpower. In the end, the Army needs fixed-wing combat aircraft for the same reasons that the Navy and Marine Corps do. Moreover, the Army cannot get reliable CAS from the Air Force, and its unique needs are Service-specific
Neuroscience, Neuroculture, and Neuroethics:Impacting Human Futures
No full textContemporary brain research is challenging Western societal norms by questioning basic cornerstones such as individuality, freedom, rationality, solidarity, and the concept of the human being in general. It is giving way to profound changes in Western concepts of culture and civilization. This volume provides a broad overview of the cultural changes incurred by neuroscience and neurotechnology, and explores the evolving fields of neuroeconomics, neuroreligion, neuropolitics, and neuroethics. It takes a multi-disciplinary approach in explaining how neuroscience and neurotechnology will affect society, and illustrates how these tools and methods are being used in research and ever-expanding practices in varying fields.https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/cdtfw-books/1000/thumbnail.jp
In Memoriam: Douglas Michael “Dorothy” Morea Commander, U.S. Navy
No full textCommander Doug “Dorothy” Morea hailed from Port Washington, New York, and graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 2004 with a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering. Doug earned his Wings of Gold in July 2006 and began training in the F/A-18 Hornet shortly thereafter
When Does Gray Zone Confrontation End? A Conceptual Analysis
No full textThe gray zone remains one of the most fashionable strategic concepts of the past few years in the United States, it encapsulates a particular subset of international relations, in the process affecting the ideational distinction between war and peace. While the gray zone concept may have negligible strategic-analytical merit, its high social utility persists and should be recognized
New Strategic Deterrence Frameworks for Modern-Day Challenges
No full textDecades of fighting militarily inferior adversaries with little to no concern of strategic escalation have atrophied the intellectual frameworks required to deter and, if necessary, fight today’s potential adversaries. Paths to nuclear use, strategies that simultaneously account for prevailing conventionally while deterring strategic attacks, and concepts to restore deterrence should an adversary choose strategic escalation are among the most important considerations the United States must contend with in an era of intensifying Great Power competition. So along with modernizing the hardware and software of the U.S. nuclear enterprise, we are called to revitalize our cognitive approaches. This requires the national security community to understand the character of today’s security environment, revisit and refresh enduring deterrence truths, and explore new deterrence frameworks necessary for modern-day challenges
The World Is Not About Us: Information and Power in the Current Strategic Environment
No full textΤhe Taj Mahal Guest House made a unique offer: Give us data, get beer.1 The Jalalabad, Afghanistan, café offered beer to anyone who brought video files, voice recordings, documents, and data dumps. The Taj shut down after Jalalabad became too hostile to outsiders, but not before its proprietors amassed extensive fine-grained data on local political and economic matters and supported projects that set up communications networks for local people. At least as important was the Taj’s role in facilitating informal personal relationships across government (foreign and local), commercial, humanitarian, and ordinary social networks. While not overtly a U.S.-led information operation, the Taj provided valuable intelligence for U.S. operations in the region. It showed how networks can be set up and used for multiple aspects of information warfare and local influence, a critical skill the United States neglected after the Cold War
Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response: The Imperative of an All-Domain Approach
No full textΤhe Department of Defense (DOD) seeks to reduce civilian harm caused by military operations and to improve its ability to respond when civilian harm occurs. To this end, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin approved and released the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan (CHMR-AP) on August 25, 2022. CHMR-AP is a watershed initiative in which DOD commits to improving its ability to prevent, mitigate, and respond to civilian harm. No amount of prevention or mitigation will eliminate civilian harm in armed conflict, nor does international law demand that civilian harm be eliminated. Still, providing civilians more protection than international law requires is a policy initiative worth pursuing
Taking Stock of the Islamic State
No full textThe fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime has reopened the debate on the U.S. military presence in Syria and the wider Middle East. The United States has three primary interests in Syria: averting adversaries’ potential possession of chemical weapon stockpiles, preventing an Islamic State resurgence in the region and accompanying external operations against the West, and limiting regional instability more generally. But the Islamic State’s resurgence has already begun to some extent. Islamic State fighters killed 139 people during an attack on a concert hall in Moscow, Russia, in March 2024. An Islamic State plot shut down Taylor Swift’s concert in Austria in August 2024. Then, in October, the FBI arrested an Afghan man and juvenile for planning an Election Day attack in Oklahoma City. The latter two attacks were halted due to intelligence and law enforcement investigations, but they feel a little too close for comfort
Chem-bio, data and cyberscience and technology in deterrence operations
No full textThe twentieth century evidenced the increasing use of state-of-the-art science and technology (S&T) in warfare. Included in this S&T armamentarium were new chemical and biological agents that could be yoked to extant forms of S&T (e.g., aircraft, ordnance, etc.) to facilitate delivery in kinetic engagements [2]. Such changes in the instruments of warfare served as impetus for formulating international signatory treaties and conventions (e.g., The Chemical Weapons Convention [CWC] and Biological Toxins and Weapons Convention [BTWC]) to govern these agents’ development and use [3]. However, recent advancements and interdisciplinary convergence in chemical, biological, data, computational, and engineering fields have enabled creation of chem-bio agents that are not (currently) regulated by these governances and, when taken together, can establish significant deterrent leverage in nonkinetic and kinetic domains [4, 5]
Safely balancing a double-edged blade: identifying and mitigating emerging biosecurity risks in precision medicine
No full textTools and methods of precision medicine are developing rapidly, through both iterative discoveries enabled by innovations in biomedical research (e.g., genome editing, synthetic biology, bioengineered devices). These are strengthened by advancements in information technology and the increasing body of data-as assimilated, analyzed, and made accessible-and affectable-through current and emerging cyber-and systems- technologies. Taken together, these approaches afford ever greater volume and availability of individual and collective human data. Machine learning and/or artificial intelligence approaches are broadening this dual use risk; and in the aftermath of COVID-19, there is growing incentive and impetus to gather more biological data from individuals and their environments on a routine basis. By engaging these data-and the interventions that are based upon them, precision medicine offer promise of highly individualized treatments for disease and injury, optimization of structure and function, and concomitantly, the potential for (mis) using data to incur harm. This double-edged blade of benefit and risk obligates the need to safeguard human data from purloinment, through systems, guidelines and policies of a novel discipline, cyberbiosecurity, which, as coupled to ethical precepts, aims to protect human privacy, agency, and safety in ways that remain apace with scientific and technological advances in biomedicine. Herein, current capabilities and trajectories precision medicine are described as relevant to their dual use potential, and approaches to biodata security (viz.- cyberbiosecurity) are proposed and discussed