Special Operations Forces a Strategic Resource: Public and Private Divides

: Within the past decade, both the U.S. Navy and U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) have undergone considerable transformation. The Navy has shifted its focus a Mahanian, fleet on fleet, blue water engagement to the brown waters of the littorals. Since receiving the designation as the lead Combatant Command for synchronizing, planning, and executing worldwide operations in the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) has increased its capacity to become rapidly deployable, agile, flexible, and tailorable to perform the most demanding and sensitive missions. In both cases, the operational utility of the helicopter operating from the sea has increased significantly. Guided by SOF theory and doctrine, influenced by the current and future threat environment, and molded after the combat-proven, habitual relationship formed between Navy helicopter squadrons and Sea, Air, Land (SEAL) forces during the Vietnam War; the Navy should designate specific rotary wing assets as SOF under the guidance of Naval Special Warfare Command (NAVSPECWAR). With a legitimate, dedicated naval helicopter SOF asset, NAVSPECWAR can maximize SOF training and operational missions in support of the Operational Commander's time-critical mission requirements. Implementation of this recommendation will ensure a truly joint SOF aviation capability, increase the supply of high demand, low density SOF rotary wing assets, and dramatically improve the operational effectiveness of SOF operations.

: Current mission preparation and analysis methods place an undue burden of effort on conventional and special operations forces to effectively synchronize and execute their increasingly complex operational responsibilities in a rapidly changing global environment. This thesis developed a tool for the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) in support of their Mission Planning, Analysis, Rehearsal, and Execution (MPARE) initiative to allow special operations forces commanders and staffs to conduct mission planning and analysis in a distributed environment, and rapidly produce dynamic synchronization matrices and scheduling products. Operations research methods provide the foundation for the analysis. The system developed in this thesis is called the Special Operations Mission Planning and Analysis Support System (SOMPASS). SOMPASS is simple to learn and operate, provides dynamic changes with little effort, and is universal in application. This system has the capability to execute on any hardware platform, operate across any network connection, and expand easily to support additional users and requirements. This thesis provides not only a demonstration of capabilities through a special operations oriented illustrative scenario, but also a working product that can be adapted for use in mission planning and analysis by all units under USSOCOM.

Evidence from recent operations shows an increasing tendency of employing Special Operations Forces (SOF) with General Purpose Forces (GPF). The larger degree of cooperation and mutual support necessitates Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) and the Services change current planning and training framework to better reflect present and future operational employment expectations. Previously SOF and GPF planners primarily focused on deconfliction of operations when needed, but Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) have demonstrated a need for

Articulation and Concordance: A Dialogue on Civil–Military Relations in Fiji

This chapter discusses the circumstances under which states can be held accountable for a breach of the ius ad bellum, when the acts in question were performed by a private military and security company (PMSC). The definition of the ius ad bellum itself is reconsidered as a corpus of norms, including a prohibition of the use of force but also encompassing obligations to prevent this use of force by private actors such as PMSCs. This lato sensu definition may lead to a recognition of state responsibility irrespective of whether or not the acts of private contractors are attributable to the state. It is argued that when a state cannot be held accountable for the violation of ius ad bellum stricto sensu by a PMSC, as a next step in determining state responsibility, respect of the due diligence principle needs to be examined. Moreover, states may have a duty to harmonise their national legal systems in order to prevent ius ad bellum violations by private actors.

In the aftermath of several incidents involving private military and security companies (PMSCs) in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many have argued that PMSCs were operating in a ‘legal black hole’ where no law applied. Since then, the use of PMSCs in war zones has continued and—due to new circumstances—evolved. Indeed, States still heavily rely on contractors in wars all around the world and due to a digitalization process PMSCs fulfil an ever-broader range of functions. Despite the clear picture of the private security sector that many believe they have, the term ‘PMSC’ now describes a wide array of private actors with very different profiles. In tandem, a regulation for PMSCs has also been developed in recent years. In 2008, the Montreux Document was signed. This instrument defines how international law applies to the activities of PMSCs when they are operating in an armed conflict zone. Two years later, the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers was finalized. At the same time, several countries have passed regulations on the use of PMSCs on their own territory and abroad. This chapter examines and categorizes the existing market, as well as new forms of private security services that have developed in recent years. Furthermore, it analyses how international humanitarian law can and should be applied to the different types of services offered. Finally, it provides an overview of the existing international initiatives aimed at regulating PMSCs and briefly examines, in this respect, different examples of national regulation.

Global governance is frequently criticised because of major legitimacy deficits, including lack of public accountability and democratic control. Within this context, questions about the legitimacy of non-state governance actors, such as non-governmental organizations, transnational corporations and private security companies, are neither an exception nor a surprise. Many actors have, therefore, turned to the measurement of performance, defined as publicly beneficial outcomes, in order to gain legitimacy. However, the rise of performance assessments as legitimizing practice is not without problems. Taking global security and health interventions as examples, this article contends that the immaterial, socially constructed and inherently contested nature of such public goods presents major obstacles for the assessment of performance in terms of observable, measurable and attributable outcomes. Performance is therefore frequently replaced by performativity, i.e. a focus on the repetitive enactment of specific forms of behaviour and capabilities, which are simply equated with the intended results. The implications for how global public goods are conceptualized and, ultimately, implemented are profound.

: The 'war on drugs' has been a rhetorical and political challenge to do something about this nation's drug problem. The current threat and the drug traffickers' centers of gravity warrant a reassessment of national security priorities and the development of a coherent, long term strategic objective. The principles of objective, unity of effort, legitimacy and perseverance as they pertain to military operations other than war provide a framework that focus unilateral and multilateral efforts against the enemy's centers of gravity. In this context, the US military has not applied all necessary means authorized by the National Command Authority to combat the drug problem. In its role of detection and monitoring drug activities and supporting law enforcement agencies, the military has not depleted the availability of illicit drugs in the US, leading some exponents to suggest that the military should divorce itself from the drug war. The risks inherent in this implicit Fabian approach to the international theater of the drug war demand synchronous engagement of the five tenets to the National Drug control Strategy. Several initiatives are proposed throughout the body of this paper, but they do not infer a 'silver bullet' solution exists to neutralize the drug threat. The US military is but one among a myriad of players engaged in the drug war, and these players must play as a team and stay in the game in order to level the playing field in the war on drugs.

Pak-US relations under Bush administration historically reached at its peak. It was the result of his doctrine known as ‘Bush Doctrine’. It resulted in constituting a fundamental shift in US foreign policy. This work tried to dig out that how Bush decided to framed his own strategies and way of using power and influence for the pursuit of USA national interests. Unlike president Clinton, president Bush focused on securing geo-strategic rather geo-economic interests. It is also tried to high light that what compelled Bush administration to tilt towards Pakistan. It includes especially inexorable geographical position of Pakistan in the region, so was preferred by US policy makers in this region. Bush even ignored US policy to promote democracy and supported undemocratic rule of General Pervez Musharraf, as his rule was inevitable to secure US national interests in the region. Authorities in Pakistan promised to assist US in its war on terror. It was the same role of Pakistan for which it was given the status of non- NATO ally. Bush Administration in return offered economic and military assistance to Pakistan. This study is based on qualitative insight to find out the real face of Pak-US relations under Bush administration. Secondary data including reports of different institutions, books, research articles and analysis by several scholars have been approached to furnish this work.

WHEN EDUCATORS open their Fibber McGee's closets of past reforms, a pile of silver bullets will spill out onto the floor. For at least the past 20 years, the sense of public confidence in public education has been fed by an arsenal of such quick, often creative, but largely unsubstantiated remedies for turning schools and kids around. And the pile became much larger this fall. The highest-caliber bullet of all--the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act--landed on top of the pile. But it was not the only presumed salvation of the public schools to lose some of its luster recently. Collecting data about these failed silver bullets can often tell us more than we've known before. The first National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report on reading and math scores that fairly reflects changes under NCLB showed essentially that, so far, this silver bullet is pretty much of a dud. Reading scores were flat, and math scores were up only a bit. Despite statements by the Bush Administration that sought to put a happy face on the findings, the NAEP data showed that progress had been better before NCLB became law than it has been since it was enacted. The data also indicate something that few pundits seem willing to acknowledge. Since the passage of NCLB, about four years ago, changes in the demographics of the student population have accelerated, and schools all over the country are feeling the impact of more English-language learners than ever before. It is to the schools' credit that NAEP reading scores--in the early grades, at least --did not go down. Moreover, the very slight improvement in math scores could be attributed partially to the fact that math test items in the early grades, and even to some extent on the eighth-grade tests, do not require advanced reading skills. (Another possible explanatory factor is that the efforts of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics have given us some semblance of national math standards and that these standards have been in various stages of implementation for more than 15 years.) The NAEP data also underscore the accident-of-birth unfairness built into state accountability systems. The erratic performance of students on state measures of achievement, compared to their performance on NAEP, demonstrates that students in some states are being held accountable for much higher levels of performance than students in other states. And no state has made much progress, as revealed in the NAEP scores. Some 20 states claim to have made progress on their own eighth-grade reading assessments between 2003 and 2005, but only three showed any progress at even the basic level on NAEP. And, according to the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, only eight of 25 states that did announce progress on their own fourth-grade reading tests had more than one-third as much progress at the basic level on NAEP. As might be expected, proponents and opponents of charter schools took the very same data and came up with different analyses. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools found them to be making more progress than other schools; the American Federation of Teachers found them to be making less, even after accounting for student-level racial/economic variables. Another silver bullet to land atop the pile of spent ones is the grandiose array of promises made by Edison Schools, Inc. In the immortal tradition of Edward R. Murrow's series You Are There, I was there when Tennessee entrepreneur Chris Whittle announced that he would launch a network of at least 100 new schools that would rival public schools in terms of technology and student achievement. …

When the government of Argentina declared itself unable to pay its debts in December 2001, the world witnessed the largest sovereign default in history. While international investors were predictably upset, the response of the USA was more unusual. Instead of supporting foreign private creditors as it had during most sovereign debt crises of the 1980s and 1990s, the US government did very little. Indeed, since the initial default, US policy makers even went out of their way to express support for the Argentine government's tough negotiating stance vis-à-vis these creditors and the imf. The Argentine government's stance culminated in early 2005 in the most dramatic private debt restructuring of recent years, under which investors took a cut of roughly 70% on the value of their bond holdings. Although US policy towards the Argentine debt default and restructuring contrasted sharply with the Bush administration's aggressive broader foreign policy since September 2001, this article shows that it reflects familiar influences: strategic goals, neoliberal ideology and conservative anti-internationalist sentiments. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of this US policy for the broader politics of international debt.

In 2002 the inclusion of North Korea by the Bush administration within the 'axis of evil' portended a break from the Clinton policy of engagement. Despite the apparent inconsistencies of this categorisation, North Korea's undoubted possession of some weapons of mass destruction capability seemed to make it a possible target for US containment if not preemption. However, Pyongyang's chief motive in such weapons development might actually be to guarantee regime survival. The revelation that North Korea had been developing a covert uranium enrichment program led US policymakers in the Bush administration to contemplate a policy of quarantine and containment. The wider policy community is divided on the question of whether Pyongyang was seeking a new bargain with the US, or whether this program was intended to produce a deterrent from possible US attack. These alternatives prescribe, respectively, a new negotiating approach or a strategy designed to dissuade. But the actual policy choice hinges on the outcome in Iraq.

Over the past ten years the military operations research community has experienced a major shift in the focus of land combat analysis. Whereas a decade ago major analysis issues dealt with armor, infantry, artillery, air defense, and air operations, emphasis is now being placed on command control, communications, intelligence, and electronic warfare. Simultaneously, efforts are being made to analyze the impact of socalled rear area processes: transportation, supply, repair, and maintenance. While for some time the term “force multiplier” has been applied to command control, communications and intelligence systems (and countermeasures), only recently has attention turned to issues such as contribution to combat and quantitative tradeoffs in a system performance. The purpose of this paper is to describe research conducted by Vector Research, Incorporated, (VRI) to develop and implement methodology appropriate to the quantitative analysis of intelligence and electronic warfare in a corps level combined arms context.

Transatlantic Environment and Energy Politics: Comparative and International Perspectives . Farnum, UK : Ashgate Publishing Ltd . xvi + 326 pages. ISBN 978-0-7546-7597-6 , £60.00 cloth. Edited by Miranda A. Schreurs, Henrik Selin, and Stacy D. VanDeveer . 2009 . With the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the European Union (EU) as a single market and ever more powerful governance system in the 1990s, new strains began to develop in the Atlantic Alliance between the United States and Europe. Many of the new conflicts concerned competitive trade and regulatory policies in the scramble for globalization, but others revolved around previously cooperative sectors such as environmental and energy policies. Transatlantic differences in these areas peaked during the George W. Bush administration but in many cases were rooted in more fundamental cultural, political, economic, and institutional factors that divide the world's two largest markets. This volume contributes significantly to the growing literature on both transatlantic relations and comparative environmental policy. Schreurs, Selin, and VanDeveer, themselves leading scholars of international environmental politics, have brought together an impressive group of North American and European academics and practitioners to examine several major questions in their field of expertise: To what extent do policies of the United States and the EU diverge or conflict? What are the sources of these differences? Are they increasing over time, or are there countertendencies toward mutual learning and convergence? How have these divergences impacted the transatlantic alliance? What are the broader implications of U.S.–EU conflicts for global environmental governance and problem solving? These are critically important issues for academics, public officials, nongovernmental organizations, and all members of the broader environmental policy community. As the editors and authors of this book point out, the conventional wisdom of role reversal in which the United States led Europe in environmental policy development through the 1980s but has become a “laggard” since 1990 as Europe has adopted far more stringent policies is somewhat too simple. While it is true that the EU has moved ahead in many areas in which precaution and sustainability are guiding principles, it is not universally true. In several areas (such as forestry certification, disease prevention, and export credit guarantees), the United States has adopted more protective policies than Europe. Furthermore, there is considerable variation in the positions of individual European countries and between the federal government and the states in the United States. Indeed, the policies of many American states are now similar to those of the EU. Nevertheless, in most of the fields covered in this volume, the EU has established substantially more precautionary policies at the federal level than has the United States and is proving successful in “uploading” many of them to become new global standards. Following an introduction by the editors, the book is divided into four sections. Part I on “Governing Within and Beyond the State” contains more general essays by Elizabeth Bomberg and Sonja Wälti on policies for sustainable development and on intergovernmental management of environmental policies, respectively. These chapters set out useful theoretical approaches for understanding how different actors establish access and influence policy on the two sides of the Atlantic through the lenses of network analysis and institutionalized opportunity structures. Part II contains five case studies of policy differences in the areas of chemicals management (Henrik Selin); banning asbestos (Marcus Carson); electronic product waste and recycling (Alastair Iles); genetically modified foods (Patricia Keilbach); and international biotech controls under the Cartagena Protocol and other international bodies (Thomas Bernauer and Philipp Aerni). In each of these areas, the EU has moved considerably beyond the United States (e.g., the EU bans all uses of asbestos and the United States and Canada do not), and in many cases European standards are increasingly taking on the role of global standards as producers in other countries (including developing countries) cannot afford to risk exclusion of their products from European markets. Part III on “Governing Carbon” contains superb chapters on renewable electricity requirements (Ian Rowlands) and on climate change policies (Schreurs, Selin, and VanDeveer). These chapters bring out the increasing richness and complexity of transatlantic relations by stressing the growing role of subnational actors in compensating for the absence of energy and climate policies at the federal level in the United States. Finally, Part IV changes the focus to international market and trade policies. Marcus Schaper compares the progressive stance of U.S. export credit agencies compared with those in Europe, especially Germany; Benjamin Cashore, Graeme Auld, Deanna Newsom, and Elizabeth Eagan extend the comparison to nonstate governance by private actors in establishing international standards for sustainable forest product certification; and Kate O'Neill adds a useful perspective on transatlantic learning and convergence in her analysis of public health management of mad cow disease and avian flu. The level of scholarship is high throughout the book. However, as is common in edited collections, the contributors do not adhere to a single methodology or set of concepts in carrying out their analyses. Some authors make much more of an effort to explain causation than others (Iles does perhaps the best job in his chapter on product regulation). Nevertheless, they find a great deal of common ground. For example, all seem to agree that the rapid development of environmental competence in the institutions of the EU during the past two decades has been a major factor in thrusting European policies ahead. At the same time, since the 1980s, U.S. policies have been driven by conservative, antiregulatory forces that have blocked advances in Congress and in some cases weakened earlier policies. Overall, institutional differences turn out to matter a great deal. This book was completed before election of the Obama administration, which has repudiated many of the policies of the Bush administration and has vowed to make energy and environmental cooperation a centerpiece in rebuilding the transatlantic alliance. It will be interesting to see whether this major shift in American politics will reverse many of the trends discussed in this book, or whether more intractable underlying factors will continue to generate conflict. A follow-up volume should be in the works to supplement this useful study.

A truly unique all-embracing narrative of the American war in Afghanistan from the own words of its architects. Choosing Defeat takes an unparalleled inside look at America's longest war, pulling back the curtain on the inner deliberations behind the scenes. The author combines his own extensive experience in the Army, the CIA, and the White House, with interviews from policymakers within the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, to produce a groundbreaking study of how American leaders make wartime decisions. Transporting you inside the White House Situation Room, every key strategic debate over twenty years – from the immediate aftermath of 9/11, to Obama's surge and withdrawal, to Trump's negotiations with the Taliban, and Biden's final pullout is carefully reconstructed. Paul D. Miller identifies issues in US leadership, governance, military strategy, and policymaking that extend beyond the war in Afghanistan and highlight the existence of deeper problems in American foreign policy.