Since the Pivot to Asia was announced on November 17, 2011, President Barack Obama has sought to refocus American diplomatic, economic, and military attention to the Asia-Pacific region. Now known as the Rebalance to Asia, the effort remains designed to refocus American policymaking on the world’s fastest growing and most populous region, following long wars in the Middle East and the 2008 financial crisis.
It is clear, examining veteran wellness holistically, that gainful employment can provide the foundation for successful transition, offering compensation, a social network, and geographic stability. While prior efforts to improve the transition process have focused on unemployment rates and hiring, this study looked beyond initial hiring data to examine the behavior of veterans in the workforce, including retention and performance, as well as corporate perceptions of how veterans perform once hired.
Despite numerous calls for a more cooperative relationship, U.S.-China ties appear to be on an increasingly competitive trajectory. Nowhere has this seemed more apparent than in the South China Sea, where rising tensions have been sowing concern throughout Southeast Asia about the durability of order in the Asia-Pacific region.
This fall, a team of scholars and researchers from AEI’s Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies participated in an exercise, hosted by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, to develop an alternative defense strategy for the United States and change the military’s capacities and capabilities accordingly. Guided by the Marilyn Ware Center’s October 2015 report To Rebuild America’s Military, the team called for a rapid reinvestment in and expansion of the US military and modeled the defense planning process over two five year periods: fiscal years 2018–2022 and 2023–2027. The presentation details the team’s conclusions and methodology.
Thomas Donnelly’s contribution to Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military, edited by Kori Schake and Jim Mattis (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2016). Are we, as Michele Flournoy, former undersecretary of defense for policy, asserts, living “in an Eliot Cohen world” when it comes to civil-military relations? Although it has sworn allegiance to energetic civilian oversight of military affairs, in behavior the US defense establishment is a creature in a Samuel Huntington world, endorsing a rigid distinction between military and civilian spheres of control. In other words, what we have today is a de facto embrace of Huntington’s “objective control” model.
NATO faces a worsening security environment defined by Russia’s growing willingness to challenge the West and a Europe whole, free, and at peace. In this new geo-political context the Black Sea region is one of the central friction zones between Russia and NATO. While the Alliance has recently pledged to protect its eastern flank against aggression, overall capacity challenges have resulted in little increased presence in the Black Sea. “A NATO Strategy for Security in the Black Sea Region” takes stock of the security and defense challenges in the broader region and offers operational and policy recommendations for NATO to address security in the Black Sea region.
On Oct. 4, 1957 at 7:28 p.m., the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first man-made satellite to circle the Earth, sparking a space race that spurred US advances in education and technology that a dozen years later landed a man on the Moon. According to NASA, the cosmic bundle of joy weighed in at 83.6 kilograms and measured 58 centimeters tall. Sputnik reportedly soared at 28,980 km/hr, according to Soviet math, the Museum of Flight writes.
The pace with which Iran’s conventional missile program has been developing in recent years suggests that the country’s missiles could become much more accurate, and thus deadly, within a few years, potentially providing Tehran with a new set of military options and a higher degree of operational flexibility. This would force (and most probably already has forced) the Pentagon to strategize and plan for a range of Iran-related military contingencies in the region like never before. As the utility of Iranian missiles expands beyond deterrence and possibly enters the realm of offense, the likelihood of military crises and kinetic flare ups in the Gulf rises.
What is driving U.S. public support for drones? Despite the large number of opinion polls available – there is very little known about the reasoning behind U.S. public preferences for unmanned air strikes, how strong these preferences are, and in what situations the American public would prefer unmanned over manned air strikes. There are two reasons for this.
Commercial and military aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group remembers Joe Sutter (1921-2016), the father of the Boeing 747 commercial jetliner.