The Arctic: A New Partnership Paradigm or the Next "Cold War"?
The United States trails other Arctic Five countries in preparing to exploit the economic and strategic opportunities being opened by an Arctic region made increasingly accessible by global climate change and offering vast natural resources. Specifically, Washington should use search and rescue (SAR) as a unifying foundation and pursue military and other cooperative ventures with the other Arctic nations. The United States must attend to its insufficient icebreaking capacity, help form a Multinational Arctic Task Force, collaborate with Russia on SAR exercises, accede to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which provides an international legal basis for Arctic rights and claims, and in other ways assert its traditional leadership rather than remaining a peripheral player.
|
07 июля 2011
Matrix of Nonlinearity: Minimum Deterrence, Missile Defenses, and Nuclear Arms Reductions
The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) could help in the transition from the superpower era of nuclear arms control to the more complex needs of the early 21st century. If U.S.-Russia relations improve, it is more likely that an agreed minimum benchmark will emerge for bilateral and perhaps multilateral negotiations. A U.S.-Russia maximum of 500 or 1,000 deployed long-range nuclear warheads would leave sufficient retaliating warheads to provide deterrence and crisis stability, but the overlap of minimum deterrence and missile defenses is complicated enough to keep negotiators bargaining for years. U.S. interest in reducing nonstrategic nuclear weapons deployed in Europe, and Russia’s wish to rearrange the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe, will create other post¬–New START nonlinearity.
|
07 июля 2011
Junior Leader PME in the PLA: Implications for the Future
An army’s professional military education (PME) reveals much about the characteristics it seeks in its personnel and about that army overall. A study of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exposes a shift from masses of personnel to “informatization” of the force. A focus on technical skills will give way to such strategic competencies as understanding the effect of nonmilitary dynamics on military affairs. Other reforms will follow, including consolidation of military schools and a centralized training and education command that can synchronize PME for the modular force. Better educated and more skilled noncommissioned officers will take pressure off the officer corps, and PLA officers will be the rough equal of officers in other modern militaries by 2025
|
07 июля 2011