International Security & Defense

5G mobile networks with ultra fast data speed are critical because they support the most advanced 21st century technology including faster Internet, smart cities, and driverless cars.

Former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson discusses national leadership responding to protests, how police organizations need to change and the importance of a criminal charge in the George Floyd case.

This paper responds to a topic from the Army War College’s Key Strategic Issues List, 2018-2020: Evaluate the ramifications of China’s and/or Russia’s interests in Africa for U.S. land forces and suggest options, both to compete and to cooperate, to further U.S. interests.

While U.S. land forces may benefit from competition or cooperation with Chinese elements in Africa, I judge that they possess limited agency to compete or cooperate in the context of these definitions. Therefore, I will take a whole-of-government approach to furthering U.S. interests in Africa vis-à-vis China.

Cathryn Cluever Ashbrook discusses the legal limitations to President Trump’s threats to use U.S. military force against protesters and looters, the role of Congress going forward and political responses to systemic racism in the U.S. with German national public radio, Deutschlandfunk.

Grand strategy is hailed by some as a silver bullet for resolving policy drift, while others reject it as a hubristic term. The author argues that expectations of this concept need to be revised. The first half of this article addresses the study of grand strategy. The author identifies and critiques the prominent conceptual frameworks for evaluating grand strategy. He offers an alternative approach for measuring the quality of a state's grand strategy, based on the notion of proportionality. The second half is tailored towards policymakers, as the article assesses the ways in which grand-strategic thinking can be improved in government.

Former Foreign Minister Yoon Young-Kwan and Joseph Nye, professor emeritus at Harvard Kennedy School, discuss COVID-19 challenges at a forum hosted by the Korean Foundation and Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center and broadcast live on YouTube on Wednesday.

For intelligence officers, there’s a special horror at abandoning colleagues who helped fight common enemies. There’s a sense of moral betrayal and shattered trust — a violation of the unwritten rules of the spy trade.

A State of Mind: Faith and the CIA is a memoir. It is also a journey of faith. The meaning of the West Point honor code - "duty, honor, country" is tested by real world experiences in intelligence.

The pandemic has pulled the future forward, forcing a changed perspective of national security, and now we must quickly adapt how we operate to reflect this reality, writes former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Sue Gordon.

Horizontal nuclear proliferation presents what is sometimes referred to as the "Nth country problem," or identifying which state could be next to acquire nuclear weapons. Nuclear fuel cycle technologies can contribute to both nuclear power generation and weapons development. Consequently, observers often view civilian nuclear programs with suspicion even as research on nuclear latency and the technological inputs of proliferation has added nuance to these discussions. To contribute to this debate, the author puts forth a simple theoretical proposition: En route to developing a civilian nuclear infrastructure and mastering the fuel cycle, states pass through a proliferation "danger zone."