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India’s Naxalite Insurgency: History, Trajectory, and Implications for U.S.-India Security Cooperation on Domestic Counterinsurgency
No full textThe pace of U.S.-India defense cooperation over the past decade—and especially the past 2 years—has been unprecedented and impressive in many areas. These areas include defense technology cooperation, the discussion of a framework for military-to-military agreements, and the expansion of joint military exercises. U.S.-India defense cooperation, however, will remain limited in critical areas where India’s historical independent interests remain firm. Among these areas of Indian reserve include strategic autonomy, the imperatives of domestic federalism, and the preference for a go-slow approach toward redressing civil unrest. Attempts by U.S. policymakers to press harder in these areas will likely prove counterproductive.https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/inss-strategic-perspectives/1020/thumbnail.jp
Korean Unification and the Future of the U.S.-ROK Alliance
No full textSecurity alliances can take many forms. They can be bilateral or multilateral, symmetric or asymmetric, highly institutionalized or largely unstructured. Regardless of form, security alliances as instruments of statecraft, at their most fundamental level, reflect a deliberate commitment among states to aggregate resources in the pursuit of common interests. For over 60 years, the U.S.–Republic of Korea (ROK) alliance has defended South Korea from external attack and, through the combined efforts of both countries, contributed to peace and stability not only on the Korean Peninsula, but also in Northeast Asia, across the Asia-Pacific, and beyond.https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/strategic-forums/1021/thumbnail.jp
Joint Force Quarterly 80 (1st Quarter, January 2016)
No full texthttps://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/jfq-full-issue/1033/thumbnail.jp
China’s Future SSBN Command and Control Structure
No full textChina’s ongoing modernization program is transforming the country’s nuclear arsenal from one consisting of a few liquid-fueled, silo-based missiles carrying single warheads to a larger force of more advanced mobile solid-fueled missiles, some of which are capable of carrying multiple warheads. Perhaps most significant for its nuclear policies, China is also on the verge of fielding its first credible sea-based nuclear deterrent, having already completed four nuclear ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) and with a fifth vessel currently under construction.https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/strategic-forums/1013/thumbnail.jp
China’s Goldwater-Nichols? Assessing PLA Organizational Reforms
No full textIn the past few months, China has announced a series of major reforms to the organizational structure of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA): the Central Military Commission (CMC) has been revamped, the four general departments dissolved, new service headquarters created, and five new theater commands established in place of the seven military regions (MRs). These changes are part of a sweeping transformation of PLA institutions, force structure, and policy that will be ongoing through 2020. In pursuing these reforms, China’s leaders hope both to tighten central political control over a force that was seen as increasingly corrupt and to build the PLA into a credible joint warfighting entity. Yet important obstacles remain, and it may be years before the implications of these reforms come into full view.https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/strategic-forums/1018/thumbnail.jp
Fifty Shades of Friction Combat Climate, B-52 Crews, and the Vietnam War
No full text“Four elements make up the climate of war: danger, exertion, uncertainty, and chance,” wrote Prussian military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz in his seminal On War. He observed that collectively, those four elements comprised the notion of friction, which he defined as “the only concept that more or less corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper.” Friction has disrupted the implementation of war plans since the dawn of civilization, and despite efforts to minimize its effects, it will continue to do so.https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/nwc-case-studies/1001/thumbnail.jp
Will Technological Convergence Reverse Globalization?
No full textThe Economist defines globalization as the “global integration of the movement of goods, capital and jobs,” and for decades, the process has been advancing. The combination of labor cost advantages, increasingly efficient freight systems, and trade agreements fueled globalization by providing regional cost advantages for manufacturing. Over the last six decades, it transformed agricultural societies into industrial powerhouses.https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/strategic-forums/1015/thumbnail.jp
National Security Reform and the 2016 Election
No full textThere are few issues of greater intrinsic importance to the United States than national security reform—or one riper for resolution. Twenty years ago most senior leaders were skeptical of allegations that the national security system was “broken”; they believed the system functioned well enough to manage the Nation’s most pressing problems. Since then numerous prominent experts have been sounding the alarm from inside the system and from without.1 No fewer than nine blue-ribbon groups have argued in favor of system reforms (see tables 1 and 2).2 The overwhelming majority of scholars publishing independently on the issue favor reform. During the 2008 Presidential election, the momentum in favor of national security reform was so strong that many thought it was inevitable. This presumption was reinforced when President Barack Obama appointed well-known proponents of reform to senior positions in the National Security Council staff, Department of State, Department of Defense (DOD), and Intelligence Community.4 Yet reform did not take place during the Obama administration, and so far it has not been an issue in the 2016 Presidential race, either. This paper examines why reform was sidetracked, whether it could emerge as a campaign issue during the 2016 Presidential election, and why it is in candidates’ and the Nation’s interest that it does.https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/strategic-forums/1019/thumbnail.jp
The NATO Warsaw Summit: How to Strengthen Alliance Cohesion
No full textIt is often stated that cohesion constitutes the center of gravity of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Yet divergent domestic pressures and external threat perceptions are threatening to pull Allies apart and leave the Euro-Atlantic security architecture in shatters. When NATO Heads of State and Government meet in Warsaw on July 8–9, 2016, the stakes will be high. Not since the end of the Cold War has the security outlook been as bleak or the collective resources for meeting multiple threats as meager.https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/strategic-forums/1016/thumbnail.jp
Violating Reality: The Lavelle Affair, Nixon, and the Parsing of the Truth
No full textOn December 20, 2010, the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) denied the Pentagon’s request, endorsed by President Barack Obama, to advance posthumously Air Force Maj Gen John D. Lavelle to the retired list in the rank of general.1 Thirty-eight years earlier, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen John D. Ryan had fired the four-star Lavelle as the Seventh Air Force commander in Saigon for allegedly conducting unauthorized airstrikes against North Vietnam and ordering the falsification of mission reports. Senate hearings in September 1972 deemed Lavelle guilty of both offenses, resulting in his demotion to major general following retirement. Yet a careful reading of documentary and taped evidence, much of it recently discovered and not available at the time of the original Senate hearings, reveals that General Lavelle neither violated the rules of engagement (ROE) that prescribed America’s air war at the time of his dismissal nor falsified mission reports. Accordingly, Lavelle should have his rank restored, and the so-called Lavelle affair should serve as a cautionary tale for political and military leaders alike who question the proper conduct of “civil-military relations” in the complex and often confounding era of modern limited war.https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/ndu-case-studies/1007/thumbnail.jp