INSS provides cutting-edge research, analyses, and innovative solutions on critical national security issues in support of the joint warfighter and Department of War stakeholders.
July 31, 2019
Five Conundrums: The United States and the Conflict in Syria
For the past 8 years, two U.S. administrations, the United Nations (UN), and numerous foreign governments have sought to end the catastrophic war in Syria and reach a negotiated political settlement to the conflict. Their efforts have repeatedly been complicated, even thwarted, by the highly contested and violent politics underlying the conflict, the sheer number of conflict actors inside and outside of Syria, and those actors’ diverse and often irreconcilable objectives.
July 29, 2019
Joint Force Quarterly 94 (3rd Quarter, July 2019)
What have you learned from the past? What future do you see? Why not write about it and share it with us? Our Forum section in this issue opens with an interview of General Terrence J. O’Shaughnessy, USAF, commander of U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command. With arguably some of the most important responsibilities in the joint force, he discusses how his commands work to protect the homeland, defend the airspace above the United States and Canada, and how the joint force is working to achieve the Chairman’s Globally Integrated Operations challenge.
July 23, 2019
Systems-based Approach to Biodefense Policy Analysis
In this article, co-authored by Dr. Diane DiEuliis, the authors describe a systems-based analysis of the US biosecurity and biodefense policy landscape to analyze functional relationships between policies. They identify two approaches in US policy for countering biological threats: prevention of theft, diversion, or deliberate malicious use of biological technologies, and development of capabilities and knowledge to assess, detect, monitor, respond to, and attribute biological threats.
The INF Treaty: A Spectacular, Inflexible, Time-bound Success
This article discusses the changing dynamics that led first Moscow and then Washington to reevaluate the merit of the INF Treaty. It concludes that the treaty's relative rigidity may play a key role in its undoing and suggests that future arms control negotiations develop more flexible and resilient mechanisms of review, dispute resolution, and verification.
July 17, 2019
The Enduring Relevance of the U.S.-Japan Alliance
For over six decades, the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security Between the United States and Japan and the U.S. forward-deployed military presence in Japan have served as the foundation of stability, prosperity, and security in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. It is the basis of the U.S. Asia-Pacific strategy and is a central pillar of its global strategy. The ability to project power halfway around the world from Japan was critical to the allies’ success in the 1991 Persian Gulf War—the USS Independence was then homeported in Japan. The deployment of the Kitty Hawk from Japan to the Persian Gulf in support of Operations Southern Watch and Iraqi Freedom underscored the global significance of the U.S. presence in Japan and the U.S.-Japan alliance.
June 4, 2019
Thucydides’ Other “Traps”: The United States, China, and the Prospect of “Inevitable” War
The notion of a “Thucydides Trap” that will ensnare China and the United States in a 21st century conflict—much as the rising power of Athens alarmed Sparta and made war “inevitable” between the Aegean superpowers of the 5th century BCE—has received global attention since entering the international relations lexicon 6 years ago. Scholars, journalists, bloggers, and politicians in many countries, notably China, have embraced this beguiling metaphor, coined by Harvard political science professor Graham Allison, as a framework for examining the likelihood of a Sino-American war.
May 30, 2019
The Mueller Report: The Missed Accelerants to Putin’s Interference
May 30, 2019 — The March 2019 Mueller Report – discussed by Mueller himself in a brief, televised press conference on May 29, 2019 - provides enormous detail on the patterns and impacts of Russian interference in America’s 2016 election that were authorized by the very top leadership in Moscow. However, the report does not explore the context behind Moscow’s choice for this brazen course of action. Combining Mueller’s insights and my past research and writing about President Vladimir Putin’s increasing appetite for foreign policy risk taking, this Strategic Insight contends that three main accelerants and one huge contextual factor encouraged Putin’s fateful early 2014 choice to meddle in and manipulate the US electoral process.
May 22, 2019
Honey, I Shrunk the Lab: Emerging Microfluidics Technology and its Implications for Chemical, Biological, and Nuclear Weapons
Emerging microfluidics technology has significant extant and potential implications for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons threats. In E&C Research Paper no. 5, Cyrus Jabbari and Philipp Bleek argue that policymakers concerned about CBRN threats have an opportunity to get ahead of, or at least less behind, some of these developments.
May 20, 2019
Finding Ender: Exploring the Intersections of Creativity, Innovation, and Talent Management in the U.S. Armed Forces
Current national-level strategic documents exhort the need for creativity and innovation as a precondition of America’s continued competitive edge in the international arena. But what does that really mean in terms of personnel, processes, and culture? This paper argues that an overlooked aspect of talent management, that of cognitive diversity, must be considered when retooling military talent management systems. Going one step further, talent management models must incorporate diversity of both skill set and mindset into their calculus. Specifically, the Department of Defense (DOD) needs to recruit, retain, and utilize Servicemembers and civilians with higher than average levels of creativity and a propensity for innovative thinking. It needs “enders.”
April 25, 2019
Europe's Responses to the Migration Crisis: Implications for European Integration
Is Europe under siege? Maybe not. But the ongoing European migration crisis has reinforced pre-existing centripetal forces generated by serious economic imbalances in the European Union (EU), especially in the financially fragile states at the EU’s external borders. Unless all twenty-eight states of the EU agree to harmonize their approach and resource commitments to border security, asylum laws, and equitable distribution of the migration burden, fragmentation and growing disunity will cause serious damage to European integration.