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July 1, 2015

The Arctic Domain: A Narrow Niche for Joint Special Operations Forces

Global climate change has catapulted the Arctic into the center of geopolitics, as melting Arctic ice transforms the region from one of primarily scientific interest into a maelstrom of competing commercial, national security and environmental concerns.

July 1, 2015

Executive Summary

Every so often we find ourselves in a place where we can take time to assess where we are, where we have been, and where we think we are going—and check it against where we think we should be ending up. This edition of JFQ offers two interviews that are assessments of events past, present, and future. Both are of stories not yet complete: one, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the other, the production of the F-35 fighter aircraft.

July 1, 2015

Rapid Regeneration of Irregular Warfare Capacity

There is widespread agreement among the public and in the foreign and defense communities that the United States should avoid “another Iraq” or “another Afghanistan”—that is, another large-scale, long-term, and highly costly stability operation. President Obama’s reluctance to put “boots on the ground” in Iraq is but the most recent example of this reaction against the high costs and questionable outcomes of the conflicts in those two countries.

July 1, 2015

Quo Vadis? The Education of Senior Military Officers

This article considers approaches to teaching senior military officers at the U.S. Army War College (USAWC). It reviews the results of several studies and surveys from the employers of our graduates and from recent graduates themselves on how best to them prepare for future assignments in the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous strategic environment.

July 1, 2015

Waffles or Pancakes? Operational- versus Tactical-Level Wargaming

Many planners agree that operational level ‘war gaming’ using the Joint Operation Planning Process (JOPP) is different from tactical level war gaming using the Military Decision Making Process (MDMP) or the Marine Corps Decision Process (MCDP). But they struggle with understanding the differences because service and joint doctrine only describe their processes and do not compare or point out differences between the processes.

July 1, 2015

An Interview with Christopher C. Bogdan

On May 12, 2015, Dr. William T. Eliason, Editor in Chief of Joint Force Quarterly, interviewed Lieutenant General Christopher C. Bogdan, USAF, Program Executive Officer for the F-35 Lightning II Program, at Bogdan’s office in Arlington, Virginia.

July 1, 2015

Turnaround: The Untold Story of the Human Terrain System

The U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS), a program that embedded social scientists with deployed units, endured a rough start as it began deploying teams to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007. These early experiences had a lasting impact on the program. Although critics have written extensively about HTS struggles with internal mismanagement, most accounts simply cataloged problems, yielded little insight into the organization’s progress over time, and ultimately gave the impression that HTS was never able to make needed corrections.

July 1, 2015

On Military Professionalism and Civilian Control

Recently, the subject of military “professionalism” has gripped the attention of top echelons of the Department of Defense (DOD) to a degree that is perhaps unprecedented. Most notably, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) General Martin E. Dempsey has directed each of the Services to review and rearticulate its understanding of the profession of arms in the context of its particular missions, traditions, and practices.

July 1, 2015

Detangling the Web: A Screenshot of U.S. Government Cyber Activity

Blackouts. School testing. Electrical grids. Insurance. These all have one major thing in common: they have all been targets for cyber attacks in a period of two weeks during March 2015. The United States faces thousands of cyber assaults every day. States, state-sponsored organizations, other groups and individuals all combine to incessantly probe, spy on, and attack public and private organizations as well as denizens of the United States. These ongoing problems require a U.S. Government response, so it adopted a bureaucratic approach that has resulted in a complex system that is constantly evolving as new problems are recognized. This article provides a comprehensive look at how the United States has organized to address these challenges. Although U.S. Government efforts seem sizable, private use of the Internet dwarfs government usage.

July 1, 2015

One Size Does Not Fit All: The Multifaceted Nature of Cyber Statecraft

To better evaluate the strategic implications of cyber as a domain in which to achieve national security objectives—from antiaccess/area denial to governance, democratization, and economic growth—policymakers need a rigorous, multifaceted framework that examines cyber statecraft not only as a military tool, but also as a more holistic form of statecraft. Such a framework is long overdue to help make sense of the great technological disruption that continues to shape the international political system. While the military component is essential, cyber statecraft is often viewed only through this coercive lens, when in fact it is much broader.