Reforms of Export Controls of Space Systems

This report on Reforms of Export Controls of Space Systems is based on meetings and interviews held in December 2014 with the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) and the Office of National Security and Technology Transfers Controls therein. This was held on the basis of non-attribution to any of the individuals involved from the Department of Commerce, and the conclusions highlighted in the following are solely the views and interpretations of Eligar Sadeh.     

Documentation: Space-Based Solar Power as an Opportunity for Strategic Security

Preventing resource conflicts in the face of increasing global populations and demands in the 21st century are high priorities for the United States Department of Defense. All solution options to these challenges should be explored, including opportunities from space. In 2007, the National Security Space Office's Advanced Concepts Office presented the idea of space-based solar power as a potential grand opportunity to address not only energy security, but environmental, economic, intellectual, and space security as well. First proposed in the late 1960s, the concept was last explored in NASA's 1997 “Fresh Look” Study. In the decade since this last study, advances in technology and new challenges to security have warranted a current exploration of the strategic implications of space-based solar power. For these reasons, the National Security Space Office sponsored a no-cost Phase 0 Architecture Feasibility Study of space-based solar power in 2007.     

Measuring “Correct Voting” Using Comparative Manifestos Project Data

The extent to which citizens vote in accordance with their own principles and priorities has been proposed as an important measure of a democracy's health. This article introduces a new method of evaluating the ability of individuals to vote for the political party with policy positions closest to their own – to vote “correctly”. Following Lau and Redlawsk (1997), a “correct vote” is defined as the vote choice individuals would make under conditions of perfect information. In other words, a vote is “correct” if it is cast for the party that a voter should vote for, based upon a fully informed comparison of his or her policy positions with those of the parties contesting an election. Voters' policy preferences are estimated here using election study data, and the positions of parties are derived through data from the Comparative Manifestos Project. For illustrative purposes, this new method is applied to the 2004 Canadian federal election. Correct voting rates are calculated by comparing voter and party positions in seven dimensions of political competition, accounting for the relative importance of each dimension. While this study's data are exclusively Canadian, the approach introduced is applicable to other settings.     

Legislative systems with absolute party discipline: Implications for the agency theory approach to the constituent-legislator link

This paper examines how the presence of absolute party discipline forces one to re-examine some of the issues surrounding the constituent-legislator link. With absolute party discipline, slack at the individual district level is determined by the policy choices of a political party, rather than by the choices of the individual legislator. This party discipline not only has implications for the representational effectiveness of individual legislators, but also results in the terms “slack” and “shirking” no longer necessarily being synonymous. The empirical work shows that Canadian political parties engaged in wide scale shirking on the 1988 U.S.–Canada Free Trade Agreement.     

‘Strangely Easy to Obtain’: Canadian Passport Security, 1933–73

Since December 1999 when an Algerian member of Al Qaeda was arrested at the US border carrying a fraudulently obtained Canadian passport, the issue of Canadian passport security has been widely discussed. However, the controversy is nothing new. This article explores the long history of the misuses of Canadian passports, which began in the early 1930s, and the efforts by the Canadian government to combat these abuses. These efforts involved considerable debate within the Canadian government, specifically between the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Department of External Affairs, over what measures were acceptable. Ultimately, the discussions around passport security have relevance to debates in the present over biometric passports and identity cards.     

Austerity versus Stimulus? Understanding Fiscal Policy Change at the International Monetary Fund Since the Great Recession

Since 2008, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has become more open to the use of discretionary fiscal stimulus packages to deal with recessions, while changing its doctrine on the timing and content of fiscal consolidation. The article traces this evolution of the Fund's doctrine to staff politics, more diverse thinking in mainstream economics, and a careful framing of the message through the use of mainstream macroeconomic models. To map the changing contours of institutional views on fiscal policy through 2008–2013, the article undertakes a detailed content analysis of official publications from the Fiscal Affairs Department and the Research Department. The connection between these shifts and significant personnel shake‐ups is demonstrated through an extensive biographical analysis of the authors of all IMF studies cited in the official reports of the two departments. The findings contribute to the emerging debate on the sources of intellectual and policy change in international economic organizations.     

Space and Security: The Emerging Role of Europe

Space systems have grown increasingly integral to the United States' national security in the post-Cold War era. The diplomatic and military leverage that space capabilities can provide is not going unnoticed by other countries. Since the collapse of the USSR, the United States has enjoyed a near-absolute dominance in space activities. Only the civilian European space program has mounted any sort of technical challenge to the United States, with little interest devoted to space military activities, but the period of US hegemony in the space military domain might come to an end. In recent years the European Union (EU) and its member states have taken numerous steps towards designing and assembling a Common Foreign and Security Policy and a coherent European Security and Defence Policy. Furthermore, several important steps toward linking security needs and space capabilities have been taken by the tandem European Union–European Space Agency and other relevant institutions. Space is now seen as an essential asset for European integration and for non-dependence in the current geo-strategic context, since space-based systems and derived information can bring necessary capabilities for autonomous decision making. The development of an integrated European space capability for security is at an early stage, but it is an ongoing process presenting some opportunities to enhance European independence and security.     

A Methodology for Improving the Investment Portfolio Management Process for the Homeland Security Department using Quality Function Deployment

In this paper, we describe a methodology for improving homeland security investment decisions. The objective is to evaluate multitechnology, multiyear investment choices and the associated development and deployment risks associated with new technologies. The budgeting process in the Homeland Security Department is a complex multicriteria decision problem involving a distributed network of decision makers with diverse areas of expertise. The decision problem in Homeland Security involves game‐theoretic aspects as the terrorists are likely to alter their strategies depending on the defensive counter measures selected in the budget. We propose a two‐phased systems approach. The first phase employs a visualization tool based on Quality Function Deployment to develop an initial budget allocation. The second phase involves an iterative approach to project selection that dynamically adjusts the investment portfolio based on anticipated reactions taken by the terrorists. This paper is based on a study done as part of a research project for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). We present a high‐level view of the methodology and illustrate it with examples.     

Military veterans and Social Security

There are 9.4 million military veterans receiving Social Security benefits, which means that almost one out of every four adult Social Security beneficiaries has served in the United States military. In addition, veterans and their families make up almost 40 percent of the adult Social Security beneficiary population. Policymakers are particularly interested in military veterans and their families and have provided them with benefits through several government programs, including Social Security credits, home loan guarantees, and compensation and pension payments through the Department of Veterans Affairs. It is therefore important to understand the economic and demographic characteristics of this population. Information in this article is based on data from the March 2004 Current Population Survey, a large, nationally representative survey of U.S. households. Veterans are overwhelmingly male compared with all adult Social Security beneficiaries who are more evenly split between males and females. Military veterans receiving Social Security are more likely to be married and to have finished high school compared with all adult Social Security beneficiaries, and they are less likely to be poor or near poor than the overall beneficiary population. Fourteen percent of veterans receiving Social Security benefits have income below 150 percent of poverty, while 25 percent of all adult Social Security beneficiaries are below this level. The higher economic status among veterans is also reflected in the relatively high Social Security benefits they receive. The number of military veterans receiving Social Security benefits will remain high over the next few decades, while their make-up and characteristics will change. In particular, the number of Vietnam War veterans who receive Social Security will increase in the coming decades, while the number of veterans from World War II and the Korean War will decline.     

What explains attitudes across US trade policies?

Examining the demographic, economic and political variables that are associated with attitudes toward various trade policies can provide some insight into the public perceptions of globalization, and the political response to those perceptions. Using detailed data from the Program on International Policy Attitudes survey “Americans on Globalization, Trade, and Farm Subsidies,” I assess a number of potential determinants of trade policy attitudes. Education is associated with pro-trade attitudes, and Democrats are pro-trade on particular, politically salient trade issues. In addition, there is substantial variation in the determinants of trade policy attitudes across policies.     

Scale,Security, and Political Economy: Debating the Biopolitics of the Global War on Terror1

Critical scholarship in Political Science and International Relations (IR) theory is turning increasingly to Michel Foucault's writings on governmentality and biopolitics to explore the complex discursive interdependencies between transnational governance and the War on Terror. Marxist critics have assailed this effort recently, however, for its premature assumption that the practices of governmental power can simply be “scaled” without the interventions of specific state-imperial powers. Yet both sides in this “debate about biopolitics” seem to rest their arguments on readings of Foucault which ignore his views on the importance of developments in the discourses of political economy for the emergence of modern governmental relations. Inspired by Foucault's recently published lectures on importance of the concept of “economic man” for neoliberal governmentality in particular, this article suggests that Foucault attributed to governmentality an explicit impulse toward economic globalization. Moreover, based on comments made in the same lectures concerning the emergence of contemporary “anarcho-liberalism” and its radically economic ontology of security, the article closes with an exploration of the crucial role played by economic knowledge in the integration of Iraq into a regime of global-governmental security.     

The mission of public policy programs: A report on recent experience

This is the report of a meeting on graduate training and research programs in public policy organized by the Ford Foundation on September 10, 1975. The meeting was attended by various representatives of the Ford Foundation along with the following representatives of public policy schools: Graham Allison, Professor, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; William B. Cannon, Former Dean, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas; John P. Crecine, Former Professor, Institute of Public Policy Studies, University of Michigan; Otto A. Davis, Dean, School of Urban and Public Affairs, Carnegie-Mellon University; Joel L. Fleishman, Director, Institute of Policy Sciences and Public Affairs, Duke University; Edward K. Hamilton, Professor, Program in Public Management, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University; Donald E. Stokes, Dean, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University; Aaron Wildavsky, Dean, Graduate School of Public Policy, University of California (Berkeley); Charles Wolf, Jr., Head of Economics Department, and Director of Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, The Rand Corporation; Douglas T. Yates, Jr., Associate Dean, School of Organization and Management, Yale University.The author acted as the rapporteur of the meeting and offers the following account with the permission of those whose views and experience are directly represented. The author owes a special acknowledgement to Peter Bell of the Ford Foundation who made many useful comments on the original account and saved the author from numerous factual errors.     

Truth,Reconciliation, and “Double Settler Denial”: Gendering the Canada-South Africa Analogy

Appeals to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) haunt most post-1990s institutional attempts to address historical injustice. Comparing Canada and South Africa, Nagy (2012) notes that “loose analogizing” has hampered the application of important lessons from the South African to the Canadian TRC—namely, the discovery that “narrow approaches to truth collude with superficial views of reconciliation that deny continuities of violence.” Taking up her important specification of the Canada-South Africa analogy, we expand Nagy’s recent findings by gendering the continuum of settler colonial violence in both locations and by outlining the implications of these TRCs for Indigenous and Black women in particular. In both the Canadian attempt to grapple with the legacy of residential schools and the South African effort to deal with a history of apartheid, institutional approaches to truth have been both narrow and androcentric. The simultaneous historical bounding and social consolidation of Indigenous experiences of abuse and injustice has thus produced a “double settler denial.”     

Regulating public procurement in Brazil,India, and China: Toward the regulatory-developmental state

Since the 1990s, emerging economies such as Brazil, India, and China have adopted transparency-enhancing public procurement regulations in line with international norms. Yet they have hesitated to join the World Trade Organization's legally binding Government Procurement Agreement (GPA). Based on the Special Issue framework, this article scrutinizes the underlying domestic and international determinants, and how they influence emerging countries’ positions in two overlapping international procurement regimes. In particular, reform-oriented state actors, societal pressure, and lesson-drawing from international templates have induced a strengthening of domestic procurement institutions and turned emerging countries into “promoters” of the international transparency regime. Conversely, the rising powers have remained, to varying degrees, reluctant “spoilers” of the GPA-based market access regime in order to keep policy space and use procurement for domestic development objectives. The article suggests that this regulatory-developmental layering of rule-based governance and interventionist ambitions characterizes the variegated regulatory state in emerging countries.     

The Political Ecology of Nostalgia

A virtual revolution in transport, telecommunications, and computational technologies is rapidly blurring the distinction between domestic and international economies....any domestic growth strategy must, almost by definition, be an export-oriented strategy....the highest growth rates and most exciting new market opportunities are in the Western Hemisphere, in Latin America, and most especially in the Pacific Rim. - Roy MacLaren, Canadian Minister for International Trade (italic added).     

Viewpoint: International Traffic in Arms Regulations—Controversy and Reform

The International Trade in Arms Regulations (ITAR) have, for decades, played a crucial role in shaping the movement of sensitive technology from the United States to the world. Originally intended to ensure military dominance, the ITAR regime is seen by some as stifling the competitiveness of American industry. A list known as the United States Munitions List (USML) contains the items subject to the ITAR export controls. This list includes clearly dangerous military technology such as missile navigation systems and fighter jet avionics but also includes seemingly benign items, such as coolant hoses or tape recorders for spacecraft. Among the items considered controversial are a number related to the space industry. An incident in the early 1990s began a jurisdictional tug of war. The United States strengthened its grip on the export of space technology. In the last two decades, some have observed a decline in the competitiveness of American industry. The content of the USML should be reviewed based not on the historical “catchall” approach, but rather based on a “military intent-based” or “military capability-based” approach. This will improve the competitiveness of the U.S. space industry without sacrificing national security.     

Space Sustainability and the Freedom of Outer Space

The concept of sustainable development states that every nation is free to determine how to meet its own needs and accrue its own benefits as long as it does not prejudice the ability of future generations to do the same. This end is challenging in the space domain as the existing emphasis on national concerns obscures the larger issues of international structural inequalities—lack of access, barriers to capacity building and technology absorption—while simultaneously magnifying issues related to market protectionism, which are then disguised as security issues. This article makes the claim that it is possible to correct this distortion while safeguarding the focus on global issues, such as space sustainability. While the concept of space sustainability is understood differently depending on the forum for discussion, it is clear that the dominant understanding coincides with the logic for space cooperation as “Governance for Global Security,” and this focuses more on the needs of the present space actors. Analytical tools designed with the “Cosmopolitan Approaches to International Law” express forms of cooperation that produce reciprocal obligations to enable all participants, both present and aspirant, in space exploration and use.     

Team-based incremental acquisition of large-scale unprecedented systems

This paper addresses certain shortcomings of traditional acquisition approaches, especially for large-scale, unprecedented systems. Shortcomings in the requirements engineering processes are emphasized. We review incremental acquisition approaches and identify issues essential to successful application of incremental acquisition approaches to overcome these shortcomings.In identifying these issues, cases based on systems being developed by the Air Force Space Command are examined. They are the Granite Sentry (GS), Space Defense Operations Centers (SPADOC), and Mobile Command and Control System (MCCS) programs. Three key aspects of the lessons learned from these efforts parallel the steps suggested by a recent Air Force Studies Board report for reducing risk in developing unprecedented systems. These are team-based development, managing requirements uncertainty and change, and increased use of incremental acquisition approaches.This work was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense. Approved for public release, distribution unlimited. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.     

International diffusion of regulatory governance: EU actorness in public procurement

This paper attempts to go beyond actor‐centered explanations of the European Union's (EU) presence in regulatory politics by examining the role of the EU in the diffusion of regulatory norms and practices. We explore the international diffusion of public procurement policy, to which multiple organizations and especially the EU and the World Trade Organization have made an active contribution. Using the “opportunity‐presence‐capability” scheme, we argue that the EU is actively co‐shaping the global agenda on public procurement, mainly as a result of the “opportunity” and “presence” dimensions of its global actorness and its role in the horizontal diffusion of public procurement regulations between international organizations. For “EU as a global actor” literature to offer valuable explanations, an in‐depth analysis of its relationship with other international organizations, such as the World Trade Organization, reveals significant interactions and the co‐shaping of policy agendas.     

Scrutinizing France: collecting and using newspaper intelligence during world war II

After the fall of France in June 1940, it became crucial for Britain to obtain grass-roots information on her former ally. Newspapers of all types were recognized to be a key source. This article investigates how intelligence material was gathered, analyzed and diffused and how it was used by a large number of government departments. The Royal Institute of International Affairs had set up the Foreign Research Press Service, which played an effective centralizing role. This article also demonstrates that the level of cooperation between the French and British departments was better than usually acknowledged and resulted in well-informed and perceptive reports.