Reports & Papers

The Intelligence and Applied History Projects hosted a National Security Act Essay Contest in 2022 entitled: “Imagining a New National Security Act for the 21st Century.” The contest sought to generate new ideas for improving the intelligence and national security community in the US based on the dynamic security environment we face in the 21st century. The essay prompt offered a variety of hypothetical scenarios where intelligence failure contributed to catastrophic failure and posed the question: what you would change now to improve the intelligence and national security posture of the US?

The winning essays, from a field of approximately 75 applicants, were authored by (1) Russell Travers, (2) Sophie Faaborg-Andersen, and (3) Marie Couture and Laurie LaPorte. The authors' winning essays appear in this report.

The Economic Diplomacy Initiative (EDI) at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs is presenting a first-of-its-kind analysis of the makeup of the Commerce Department’s Entity List, by country, by sector, and by year of addition. Starting with raw data made available by the Commerce Department, we manually grouped blacklisted sub-entities at the parent level to give a clearer view of the companies targeted by export controls. While  the Entity List does not include industry tags, we used Federal Register announcements and secondary research to manually assign industry sectors to each entity. The analysis provides a quantitative review of the evolving use of the entity list to shed light on shifting aims of US economic and national security policy.

This essay makes three arguments. First, the US government will need to establish a coronavirus commission, similar to the 9/11 commission, to determine why, since April 2020, the United States has suffered more coronavirus fatalities than any other country in the world. Second, the COVID-19 pandemic represents a watershed for what will be a major national security theme this century: biological threats, both from naturally occurring pathogens and from synthesized biology. Third, intelligence about globalized challenges, such as pandemics, needs to be dramatically reconceptualized, stripping away outmoded levels of secrecy.

With reservations about venturing into territory outside our normal wheelhouse, and in full certainty that some of what we write here will in retrospect turn out to have been wrong, a team of researchers at the Belfer Center and I have been collecting all the data we have been able to find about coronavirus, analyzing it to the best of our ability, and debating competing answers to the fundamental questions about the challenge this novel virus poses to our nation.

What follows is our current first-approximation of a work in progress. We are posting at this point in the hope of stimulating a wider debate that will include a much larger number of analysts beyond public health professionals and epidemiologists—including in particular intelligence officers, financial wizards, historians, and others.

The nine issue papers contained in this report were proposed and written by graduate students at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School. They present fact-based, nonpartisan analysis to help focus the next Administration on the key policy debates that must be resolved. And, they aim to create a platform for our students to engage with the most pressing policy issues of the day as they continue their careers in public service.