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Feb. 1, 2010

Affordable Defense Capabilities for Future NATO Missions

This Special Report was produced by CTNSP to support the NATO Strategic Concept process. The new NATO Strategic Concept offers an important opportunity to strengthen efforts to reform and modernize NATO institutionally, and develop new defense capabilities for the Alliance. To achieve these aims, NATO muse begin a separate transformational process to assess current military capabilities and pursue future requirements over a 5-10 year period. The goal should be to develop specific sets of initiatives and reforms for approval by Heads of State and Government at the Lisbon Summit in 2010. This process should be informed by the development of the new Strategic Concept and run parallel to it. In a rapidly changing security environment, postponing such a process until after the Strategic Concept is completed would increase risks for the Alliance. This report is designed to stimulate that parallel process.

Jan. 1, 2010

U.S. Withdrawal from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty

As President George W. Bush made these remarks in a speech at the National Defense University (NDU) on May 1, 2001, National Security Council (NSC) Senior Director for Proliferation Strategy, Counterproliferation, and Homeland Defense Robert Joseph listened attentively. Within just 4 months of taking office, President Bush was articulating one of his key national security priorities: setting the conditions for the United States to move full steam ahead on developing, testing, and eventually deploying a wide range of missile defense technologies and systems—a priority that in all likelihood would mean U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty.

Dec. 1, 2009

STAR–TIDES and Starfish Networks: Supporting Stressed Populations with Distributed Talent

The Department of Defense increasingly is involved in postwar stabilization and reconstruction, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief missions, capacity-building of partner nations at home and abroad, and other such complex operations. To provide sustainable support to stressed populations in these environments, an international, networked, knowledge-sharing research project called Sustainable Technologies, Accelerated Research–Transformative Innovation for Development and Emergency Support (STAR–TIDES) encourages innovative approaches to public-private collaboration, whole-of-government solutions, and transnational engagement. It leverages a distributed network of people and organizations to conduct research, support real world contingencies, and bridge gaps among disparate communities.

Dec. 1, 2009

Crosscutting Issues in International Transformation: Interactions and Innovations among People, Organizations, Processes, and Technology

This book is a compilation of papers presented at the International Transformation Conference in Stockholm, Sweden on June 2-3, 2009. The conference was hosted by the Swedish Defence Research Agency, FOI. The papers are organized according to the categories of culture, interagency, transformation initiatives, leadership, and adaptive organizations.

Dec. 1, 2009

Defense Business Transformation

Over the past 20 years, information technology has been rapidly advancing, producing new capabilities that enable organizations to greatly enhance visibility into their business operations. While many private organizations have successfully taken advantage of these new technologies to develop enterprise-wide information systems that reduce costs and improve performance, the federal governments still lags far behind. DoD, one of the largest organization in the world with an annual budget over $500 billion, still relies on several thousand, non-integrated, and noninteroperable information legacy systems, that are error prone and redundant and do not provide the enterprise visibility necessary to make sound management decisions. Moreover, between FY07 and FY 09, DoD has requested from Congress over $47 billion in appropriations to operate, maintain, and modernize these business systems.

Dec. 1, 2009

A Policymaker’s Guide to Bioterrorism and What To Do About It

This paper draws together several years of work in an attempt to suggest the outlines of this thinking about the risk that the author regards as most pernicious: biological terrorism. It is written for those who desire a better understanding of this risk and its implications for policymakers.

Dec. 1, 2009

DTP-071: Forecasting Science and Technology for the Department of Defense

This paper discusses recent trends in S&T, particularly how various disciplines have converged to produce new capabilities, and considers how a new series of studies might be conducted taking into account such convergences.

Nov. 1, 2009

To Build Resilience: Leader Influence on Mental Hardiness

The military profession is inherently stressful and is getting more so for U.S. troops, who are deploying more often and for longer periods of time on missions that are multifaceted, changeable, and ambiguous. Such stressful conditions can lead to a range of health problems and performance decrements even among leaders. But not everyone reacts in negative ways to environmental stress. Most people remain healthy and continue to perform well even in the face of high stress levels. While much attention in recent years has focused on identifying and treating stress-related breakdowns such as post-traumatic stress disorder, scant investment has gone toward the study of healthy, resilient response patterns in people.

Oct. 1, 2009

Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction: Looking Back, Looking Ahead

This Occasional Paper traces the general evolution of the countering WMD enterprise in the Clinton and Bush administrations and anticipates some of the major WMD challenges that lie ahead.

Oct. 1, 2009

President Nixon’s Decision to Renounce the U.S. Offensive Biological Weapons Program

The nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union was a prominent feature of the Cold War. A lesser known but equally dangerous element of the superpower competition involved biological weapons (BW), living microorganisms that cause fatal or incapacitating diseases in humans, animals, or plants. By the late 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union had both acquired advanced BW capabilities. The U.S. biological weapons complex, operated by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, consisted of a research and development laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland, an open-air testing site at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, and a production facility at Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas that manufactured biological warfare agents and loaded them into bomblets, bombs, and spray tanks.