Assessing Causality in a Complex Security Environment
In May 2014, I was moderating a Naval War College seminar on the topic of U.S. policy in the Middle East. The discussion involved President George W. Bush’s statement that a democratic Iraq would serve as a “beacon of democracy” in the Middle East, leading nations and peoples in that region to reappraise their systems of government and, perhaps, initiate democracy movements of their own. A student raised his hand.
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18 января 2015
Should Military Officers Study Policy Analysis?
Recently, during a symposium with security studies faculty members from civilian institutions, the question arose as to how those of us who teach in the country’s professional military institutions approach the study and use of policy analysis in our classrooms. There was a certain degree of incredulity that places such as the Naval War College (and its sister institutions) would encourage their students—people bound by oath to faithfully execute the orders of the commander in chief—to probe and analyze decisions taken by the current and past Presidents as part of their academic experience. Indeed, many question whether military officers need to engage in the dissection and discussion of national security decisionmaking since, echoing Alfred Tennyson’s famous exhortation in his classic poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die.” Others take the view that, for military officers, ignorance may be bliss, following the advice popularly ascribed to the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck: “The less the people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep in the night.”
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18 января 2015
Debunking Technical Competency as the Sole Source of Innovation
Academic and governmental organizations have sounded the alarm that the United States is rapidly losing technical competence, and this decline places the Nation at risk. A 1983 National Science Foundation (NSF) report stated, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well view it as an act of war.”1 In 1999, Congress chartered the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century (also known as the Hart-Rudman Commission) to provide the most comprehensive Government-sponsored review of U.S. national security in 50 years. The report highlighted a lack of U.S. technical competence as a national security threat second only to the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists.2 This article attempts to answer the question: “Does improving technical competency enhance innovation?”
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18 января 2015