Afghanistan looms as the key foreign policy challenge for the Obama administration. Under the previous Bush administration, foreign policy was driven primarily by security considerations, and Afghanistan was viewed a frontline state in the Global...
Agencies must engage in a whole-of-government approach to protect the nation and its interests from diverse threats such as terrorism and infectious diseases. However, GAO has reported that gaps in national security staff knowledge and skills pose...
At the U.S. southwest border there exists the intersection of two distinct cultures, economies, political systems, and ideas of what comprises the national security interests of the U.S. and Mexico. Those security interests stem from a desire to...
Contingency operations are currently taking place in dangerous, unpredictable, and highly volatile environments where local government institutions have weakened or collapsed. In view of these conflict situations, it is recognized that the initial...
Currently, an interagency gap exists between local civil authorities and tactical military forces preparing for and conducting all phases of domestic civil support operations. The gap exists for two primary reasons: (1) military forces operate in a...
Early in the history of the Republic, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention and the members of the subsequent Congresses understood that the President required power to execute the laws of the land. Under authority of the Militia Clause,...
Examination of post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction operations (SRO) planning and execution following Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom has revealed critical shortfalls in the United States’ ability to conduct...
First Place Winner of the MacArthur Military Leadership Writing Competition for the 2010 CGSC Class. Lessons learned from manually tracking friendly and enemy forces during Operations Desert Storm (ODS) in Iraq and Restore Hope in Somalia, resulted...
Given the importance of security force assistance in an era of persistent conflict and the need for counterinsurgency operations, what makes indigenous police forces effective in counterinsurgency? This monograph proposes that, if the Army faces an...
Globally, potential adversaries are building ever more complex, stronger, and deeper fortifications which are largely immune to the current United States weapons inventory. Advanced construction and design techniques coupled with technological...
In 1969, President Nixon started the now well-known "War on Drugs." The reason behind his "declaration" of war was the increasing national security threat posed by the transnational drug trafficking organizations. With the aim of making as much...
In 2010, at a conference held by the Cornwallis Group, an international organization interested in peace operations and whole-of-government approaches, Dr. Cynthia Irmer, Senior Conflict Prevention Officer for the Department of State Office of the...
In a 2009 address to the students and faculty at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, commented, "The United States military is necessary,...
In order to facilitate U. S. national security strategy, the U. S. Military has a renewed focus on conducting Stability Operations. These complex operations often take place over long periods and involve various different, but interrelated tasks....
In the years after invading Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military realized that it had a problem: How does a military force set the economic conditions for security success? This problem was certainly not novel--the military had confronted it...
In this edition of the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) Special Operations newsletter, we will examine the special operations forces (SOF) perspective of irregular warfare (IW) at the operational and tactical levels through a selection of...