Dec. 30, 2014

Debunking Technical Competency as the Sole Source of Innovation

Academic and governmental organizations have sounded the alarm that the United States is rapidly losing technical competence, and this decline places the Nation at risk. A 1983 National Science Foundation (NSF) report stated, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well view it as an act of war.” In 1999, Congress chartered the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century (also known as the Hart-Rudman Commission) to provide the most comprehensive Government-sponsored review of U.S. national security in 50 years. The report highlighted a lack of U.S. technical competence as a national security threat second only to the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists. This article attempts to answer the question: “Does improving technical competency enhance innovation?”

Dec. 30, 2014

Should Military Officers Study Policy Analysis?

Recently, during a symposium with security studies faculty members from civilian institutions, the question arose as to how those of us who teach in the country’s professional military institutions approach the study and use of policy analysis in our classrooms. There was a certain degree of incredulity that places such as the Naval War College (and its sister institutions) would encourage their students—people bound by oath to faithfully execute the orders of the commander in chief—to probe and analyze decisions taken by the current and past Presidents as part of their academic experience. Indeed, many question whether military officers need to engage in the dissection and discussion of national security decisionmaking since, echoing Alfred Tennyson’s famous exhortation in his classic poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die.” Others take the view that, for military officers, ignorance may be bliss, following the advice popularly ascribed to the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck: “The less the people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep in the night.”

Dec. 30, 2014

Assessing Causality in a Complex Security Environment

In May 2014, I was moderating a Naval War College seminar on the topic of U.S. policy in the Middle East. The discussion involved President George W. Bush’s statement that a democratic Iraq would serve as a “beacon of democracy” in the Middle East, leading nations and peoples in that region to reappraise their systems of government and, perhaps, initiate democracy movements of their own. A student raised his hand.

Dec. 30, 2014

Next Steps for Transforming Education at National Defense University

National Defense University (NDU) is implementing major reforms in the graduate-level programs it provides senior military officers and other national security professionals. If all goes as planned, the result will be a transformation in the way the university educates senior national security leaders.1 This article does not review the status of current change initiatives. Instead, it looks beyond the changes under way for the 2014–2015 academic year and identifies future steps senior leaders might consider in order to maintain momentum for the transformation of joint professional military education.

Dec. 30, 2014

A Strong Force Is a Diverse Fighting Force

A strong fighting force is a diverse fighting force. Said another way, diversity equals combat power. Therefore, we should strive to have diversity, both up and down the ranks, because it makes us better. In addition to the benefits of diverse views and opinions, it is important for the top echelon of military leadership to reflect the diversity of the Nation—not to achieve numbers for the sake of achieving numbers, but because young enlisted members and officers need to see a way to top leadership positions if they have the drive and talent to get there.

Dec. 30, 2014

Revisioning Strategic Communication through Rhetoric and Discourse Analysis

Strategic communication is an important but contested issue, visible in continuing criticisms over the last 5 years. One critique is that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) definition of the term strategic communication is vague and idiosyncratic in relation to the definitions of other agencies. In turn, this argument runs, the lack of conceptual clarity and of shared, precise terminology hurts the implementation and further development of strategic communication. Additional concerns have been raised about the lack of both domestic interagency and foreign partner coordination and cooperation and the absence of credible expertise in strategic communication. Still, criticisms point to high-visibility failures in strategic communication—for example, the 2001 “Shared Values” campaign and the 2012 U.S. Presidential response to the “Innocence of Muslims” video—as evidence of both strategic communication conceptual flaws and implementation failures.

Dec. 30, 2014

A Theater-Level Perspective on Cyber

Most U.S. military cyber professionals will tell you that “defense is the main effort” and that providing secure and reliable communication is job one. In practice, however, most cyber discussions focus on sophisticated computer hackers conducting exploitation (espionage) or attack (sabotage) operations. The reasons for this seeming contradiction include cyber espionage intrusions, industrial-scale intellectual property theft, and denial-of-service attacks that cost millions of dollars and naturally capture headlines and the imagination. Likewise, the potential for cyber attacks to disrupt infrastructure with kineticlike consequences provides fodder for books and articles that bridge reality and science fiction, empowering armchair theorists to contemplate a new and different type of war and warrior.

Dec. 30, 2014

Refocusing the U.S. Strategic Security Perspective

Since the early days of Cold War rivalry between the United States and Soviet Union, policymakers have recognized that low-intensity conflict and limited wars often occur in spite of deterrence—that is, using the threat of military force or coercion to change an adversary’s behavior. Because of this shortcoming and risk of escalation, the United States has applied deterrence haphazardly in its relationship with China. Yet U.S. policymakers have failed to identify an alternative approach for chronic disputes that are not readily shaped by military posturing. This deficiency is overlooked at the expense of muddling through commonplace confrontations with China over fishing rights, maritime borders, and cyberspace rather than establishing consistent mechanisms to reduce tension and prevent escalation. Some analysts, such as Richard K. Betts, see only two stark choices to address this dilemma: “accept China’s full claims as a superpower when it becomes one or draw clear redlines before a crisis comes.” However, we do not need to limit our options to deterrence or acceptance. Rather, we should complement deterrence with a more flexible, strategic framework focused on conflict management.

Dec. 30, 2014

Nonlethal Weapons: A Technological Gap or Misdefined Requirements?

The internal and international conflicts that have taken place in the last few decades have significantly raised the issue of interacting with with civilian populations, a problem that has been worsened by urbanization. In the last few decades of the 20th century, a universal respect for human life became a crucial variable within the international community in general and Western societies in particular. In this new political reality, the military seeks new technologies that have “greater precision, shorter duration, less lethality, and reduced collateral damage . . . [as these technologies] may provide more effective power than their larger and more destructive, but also more inexact and crude, predecessors.” Nonlethal weapons (NLW) would seem to be the perfect answer for this military quest; however, observers point out that, to date, “few non-lethal weapons incorporating new technologies have actually been deployed on a large scale” and that “operational use of available non-lethal weapons by the military has been limited.” Despite the reasonable demand for the employment of less lethal military technologies on the battlefield, then, it seems that such technologies are still far from becoming a reality.

Dec. 30, 2014

Challenges to Improving Combat Casualty Survival on the Battlefield

The United States has achieved unprecedented survival rates (as high as 98 percent) for casualties arriving alive to a combat hospital.1 Official briefings, informal communications, and even television documentaries such as “CNN Presents Combat Hospital” highlight the remarkable surgical care taking place overseas. Military physicians, medics, corpsmen, and other providers of battlefield medical care are rightly proud of this achievement. Commanders and their troops can be confident that once a wounded Servicemember reaches the combat hospital, his or her care will be the best in the world.