Michael J. Mazarr

Hubris, Negligence, and America's Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy

Leap of Faith

Nuclear Weapons in a Transformed World sets out to examine one of the most pressing issues of the twenty-first century: the future of nuclear weapons. Acknowledging the growing consensus that pushing nuclear weapons to the margins of world politics would represent the wisest political and moral choice for the United States, a stellar group of scholars has been assembled in this volume to analyze one solution to the problem: virtual nuclear arsenals. First proposed by Jonathan Schell in his 1984 book The Abolition , this option involves removing all nuclear weapons from operational status and placing them in a dismantled, 'virtual' condition. Essays by many of the world's top experts on arms control and international relations combine to offer the first detailed assessment of what may be the most promising and provocative idea in the field today. Thorough, balanced, and probing, Nuclear Weapons in a Transformed World opens the debate on a concept which could possibly determine the future of arms control and US policy.

Nuclear Weapons in a Transformed World

This book examines the role of risk management in the recent financial crisis and applies lessons from there to the national security realm. It rethinks the way risk contributes to strategy, with insights relevant to practitioners and scholars in national security as well as business. Over the past few years, the concept of risk has become one of the most commonly discussed issues in national security planning. And yet the experiences of the 2007-2008 financial crisis demonstrated critical limitations in institutional efforts to control risk. The most elaborate and complex risk procedures could not cure skewed incentives, cognitive biases, groupthink, and a dozen other human factors that led companies to take excessive risk. By embracing risk management, the national security enterprise may be turning to a discipline just as it has been discredited.

Lessons of the Financial Crisis for Risk Management

Rethinking Risk in National Security

Five years into the war on terror, we still don't understand the supposed "enemy." Official analyses of radical Islam remain simplistic and unhelpful for understanding the motivations and mindsets of people still characterized simply as "evildoers who hate freedom." This book offers a new way of understanding this challenge and figuring out what to do about it. It concludes with specific policy suggestions for a new approach to replace the badly-failing current strategy. This book approaches radical Islam by putting it into a comparative context. It makes a big, bold argument about the character of the threat and the nature of world politics in this provocative and wide-ranging examination of radical Islamists.

Radical Islam, Terrorism, and the War on Modernity

Unmodern Men in the Modern World

Timothy R. Heath

Astrid Stuth Cevallos

As economic power diffuses across more countries and China becomes more dependent on the world economy, Chinese leaders are being forced to abandon their largely passive approach to global governance. This report analyzes China’s interests and behavior to evaluate both the recent history of its interactions with the postwar international order and possible future trajectories. It also draws implications from that analysis for future U.S. policy.

China and the International Order

Andrew Radin

Miranda Priebe

Cevallos Astrid Stuth

In the first report of a series on the emerging international order, RAND researchers examine the liberal order in effect since World War II, including the mechanisms by which the order affects state behavior, the engines that drive states to participate, and the U.S. approach to the order since 1945.

[Building a Sustainable International Order series]

Understanding the Current International Order

Ashley L. Rhoades

This report evaluates the postwar international order's value, assessing its role in promoting U.S. goals and interests and assessing its measurable contributions to specific goals.

Testing the Value of the Postwar International Order

Strategic Studies Institute

U. S. Army War College

"Discussions of an emerging practice of 'gray zone' conflict have become increasingly common throughout the U.S. Army and the wider national security community, but the concept remains ill-defined and poorly understood. This monograph aims to contribute to the emerging dialogue about competition and rivalry in the gray zone by defining the term, comparing and contrasting it with related theories, and offering tentative hypotheses about this increasingly important form of state competition. The idea of operating gradually and somewhat covertly to remain below key thresholds of response is hardly new. Many approaches being used today -- such as support for proxy forces and insurgent militias -- have been employed for millennia. The monograph argues that the emergence of this more coherent and intentional form of gray zone conflict is best understood as the confluence of three factors. Understood in this context, gray zone strategies can be defined as a form of conflict that pursues political objectives through integrated campaigns; employs mostly nonmilitary or nonkinetic tools; strives to remain under key escalatory or red line thresholds to avoid outright conventional conflict; and moves gradually toward its objectives rather than seeking conclusive results in a relatively limited period of time. Having examined the scope and character of gray zone conflict, the monograph offers seven hypotheses about this emerging form of rivalry. Finally, the monograph offers recommendations for the United States and its friends and allies to deal with this challenge"--Publisher's web site.

Understanding a Changing Era of Conflict

Mastering the Gray Zone

From Saddam Hussein's first bold threats in 1990 to the stunning ground phase of Desert Storm in early 1991, the crisis in the Gulf captured the world's attention. This high-tech, low-cost war was televised nightly from beginning to end, accompanied by on-the-spot interpretations of strategy and its implications. But what did we learn from this crisis? Did the United States bungle its attempts at discouraging Saddam's aggressive actions, or is deterrence simply not a reliable foreign policy tool? Are chemical weapons truly the "poor man's atom bomb"? Does the war represent a good model for future crises, or did circumstances make this war more of an anomaly than a precedent? How did the ail-volunteer U.S. force perform? By combining exciting, detailed vignettes of the crisis with insightful discussions of its consequences, this book opens up an informed debate concerning the true military and geopolitical lessons of the conflict. Representing a distillation of the best thinking on defense and foreign policy in Washington, Desert Storm also incorporates the testimony of the inside players during the crisis—the people who actually planned and fought the war. Combining academic rigor and in-depth military expertise, the authors challenge the complacency of the emerging conventional wisdom regarding the conflict, taking us beyond mere chronicling and instant analysis to a riveting reenactment of the war and the serious consideration of its long-term implications.

The Gulf War And What We Learned

Desert Storm

Luke J. Matthews

Abigail Casey

Ryan Michael Bauer

The evolution of advanced information environments is rapidly creating a new category of possible cyberaggression, which RAND researchers are calling virtual societal warfare in an analysis of the characteristics and future of this growing threat.

Social Manipulation in a Changing Information Environment

The Emerging Risk of Virtual Societal Warfare

The practitioners of hostile social manipulation employ social media, forgeries, harassment, distribution of rumors, and other tools to cause damage to their target state. This report focuses on the information warfare activities of Russia and China.

Michael J. Mazarr

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