Month: April 2014

Is the DoD Innovating? How the New Budget Stacks Up

Image: Flickr.

Editors note: This article was originally published by War on the Rocks on 17 March 2014.

As the Pentagon faces inevitable budget cuts, “innovation” and “adaptation” are the buzzwords of the day, but are they reality? The recent Department of Defense (DoD) Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) identifies innovation as a core theme, and Department leaders have gone to great lengths to stress that they have chosen to protect key investments for the future, even in lean times. The capability areas that DoD says it is protecting—cyber operations, special operations forces, and development of a new long-range bomber—indeed make sense strategically and will be extremely useful in future operating environments. DoD has also stressed that it is maintaining research and development funding in order to retain the U.S. military’s technological edge.

These overarching principles are almost certainly the right ones, but resources need to back them up. As the saying goes: “if it ain’t in the [budget], it ain’t.” In some areas, DoD is putting its money where its mouth is.

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Review – Visual Politics and North Korea

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This article was originally published by E-IR.info on 1 April 2014.

Visual Politics and North Korea: Seeing is Believing
By: David Shim.  London and New York: Routledge, 2014

More often than not, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, commonly known as North Korea, is featured in the media as a secretive, harsh, irrational, and dangerous country, whose leaders are incapable of interacting with the international community, and whose citizens are slowly dying at the ill will of those leaders. Such characterization has been bolstered – and to some extent popularized, especially in North America – by a number of representations of North Korea as the “other,” the “enemy,” and the embodiment of an “axis of evil,” as well as a country that is so alien and strange that its late leader, Kim Jong Il, was featured as a satirical character in the puppet movie Team America a decade ago.

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Categories
Regional Stability

India: Jostling for Geopolitical Control in Afghanistan

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Editor’s note: This article was originally published by openSecurity on 27 March 2014.

There is increasing anxiety among stakeholders as US forces prepare for a drawdown in Afghanistan by the end of 2014. The international community, including the United States, is still groping in the dark when it comes to Afghanistan’s future. As such, they have somewhat ignored India, which, in fact, will be pivotal in solving the Afghan dilemma. Instead, the west and regional stakeholders have focussed on Pakistan as the major player in post-2014 Afghanistan.

Pakistan has been accused of supporting the Afghan Taliban and of providing sanctuary to them inside Pakistan in order to maintain strategic depth and influence within Afghanistan. Furthermore, Pakistan has been charged with supporting the Afghan Taliban and their affiliate, the Haqqani network, in order to counter India in Afghanistan, as well as of sending militant groups such as Laskhar-e-Taiba into Indian-administered Kashmir. Pakistan has denied these accusations.

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Disarmament: Learning to Challenge Our Assumptions

Photo: Truthout.org/flickr.

On 12th June 1982, an estimated one million people converged in Central Park, Manhattan, to rally in support of nuclear disarmament.  It marked the peak of a wave of public engagement that began over nuclear power, but had morphed into a push against the nuclear arms race that had come to epitomize the Cold War era.  In Europe, a number of similar protests in 1983 drew an estimated total of 3 million people.

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Categories
Regional Stability

Why 2014 in Asia Will Not be a Repeat of 1914 in Europe

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The Jeremiah prophets are coming out of the woodwork to predict that there will be an outbreak of war between the major powers in Asia, just like in Europe 100 years ago. The idea is that a rising China will inevitably go to war with the United States, either directly or through conflict with Japan.

Some commentators are even suggesting that the Sarajevo incident that provoked World War I will be replicated between China and Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea. Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has likened this situation to what he calls ‘a 21st-century maritime redux of the Balkans a century ago — a tinderbox on water’. My colleague Hugh White recently proclaimed that the risk of war between China and Japan is now very real.

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