Towards a Balanced and Sustainable Defense

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates defines “balance” as the critical principle of his defense strategy. This emphasizes achieving a balance between current conflicts and dangerous and more conventional wars in the future. But finding the right balance between types of war is only one form of balance. We also need to balance the nation's checkbook, and define the balance between what we spend on defense and what we can afford for the long term. Balance is not enough, our defense investments must be sustainable. Defense spending today, in inflation adjusted dollars, is at an all time high and exceeds Cold War levels. This has helped sustain the world's finest military, but the funding for this buildup and two wars has been borrowed from foreign sources. The accumulated debt and subsequent interest payments have reduced our ability to weather the current economic crisis and will drag on our economic recovery for years to come. The Obama administration must craft a grand strategy to get us out of the red—strategically and fiscally. This essay offers a set of strategy, structure and investment shifts to that end.     

Grand Strategy after the Vietnam War

The perceived history of the Vietnam War profoundly influenced American discussions on grand strategy during the postwar period. The two largest schools of thought, one favoring confrontation with the Soviet Union and the other favoring engagement, drew lessons from the war based upon differing historical interpretations and used those lessons as support beams in constructing grand strategy. Compelling world events during the Carter presidency caused only a few individuals to shift positions in the debate, but one of those individuals was Jimmy Carter himself. Subsequent discoveries by historians indicate that the confrontation school understood the war's history and the postwar world better than did the engagement school and consequently crafted a superior grand strategy. The post-Vietnam debate contains numerous parallels to present-day discussions of grand strategy and offers a variety of lessons salient to contemporary strategic formulation.     

The Age of Liberal Imperialism: Twenty-five Years of a Flawed U.S. Foreign Policy

The most common assertion about U.S. foreign policy appearing in scholarly journals and opinion articles is that it is incoherent. This article will show that nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it is a growing cohesiveness from political science centered around the democratic peace thesis and a growing interdisciplinary consensus that western human rights need to be granted and enforced around that world that has fed into a highly cohesive, highly militarized, foreign policy of what will be defined as Liberal Imperialism.     

The Revenge of Geopolitics

On the eve of Bill Clinton's second term, Harvey Sicherman wrote that the President must educate public opinion, cultivate congressional consensus, manage international coalitions, and use military power decisively when needed.     

Serdyukov Promotes Systemic Russian Military Reform

Despite the manifold problems in Russian Defense Minister Anatoliy Serdyukov's radical reform agenda, there is clear evidence that such a program is being implemented regardless of opposition from those in uniform, especially on the General Staff. It is no exaggeration to suggest that depending on how fully it is implemented, this reform could have an impact on the lives of all Russian officers no matter where they serve now. The mass mobilization principle has been abandoned and the transition from a division-based system to the new brigade structure is complete. Meanwhile, despite careful planning by the General Staff, we do not believe the Russian military will emerge as a modern fighting force until 2020, if then. Budget cuts, production inefficiencies, poor maintenance and sloppy work will all inhibit the construction of a modern Russian army.

This is essentially a totally different army, the foundation of which was laid this year. And this is the country's organizational victory.(Colonel (retired) Vitaliy Shlykov, Liliya Biryukova, Aleksandr Sargin, Denis Telmanov, Gazeta, November 20, 2009.)

     

The insider threat and employee privacy: An overview of recent case law

The detection of insider threats is one area of ongoing work at the CERT^® Insider Threat Center. This paper addresses the legal landscape surrounding employee privacy in the workplace. While this broad area implicates many different types of law, this paper focuses on some current issues that employers may want to be aware of when implementing policies and practices to mitigate the insider threat, including monitoring of current employees. Electronic, physical and other methods of monitoring are discussed, which can reveal insider threat indicators. Relevant federal and state laws are also discussed.¹