Landpower: USAWC Strategy Conference and Two New Articles
U.S. Army War College hosts its 25th Annual Strategy Conference in Carlisle, Pennsylvania from April 8-10, 2014. Participants can participate either in person or watch live on-line. Theme for this year’s annual strategy conference is: “Balancing the Joint Force to Meet Future Security Challenges”.
No cost to register. Speakers include: Army Chief of Staff GEN Raymond Odierno, Richard N. Haass, President, Council on Foreign Relations; ADM Dennis Blair, USN, Ret.; Robert D. Kaplan; Dr. T.X. Hammes; Lieutenant General William C. Mayville, Joint Staff, Director for Operations (J3); Major General John W. Nicholson, Jr. Commanding General 82nd Airborne Division; and many others. Additional information concerning: registration, agenda, admin, and key speaker information is here: http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/conf/
Two new posts to Landpower include:
Defense Planning for National Security: Navigation Aids for the Mystery Tour
The challenge that is defense planning includes: "educated futurology" and the humanities as methodological approaches; futurists and scenarios, trend spotting and defense analysis; the impossibility of science in studying the future; the impossibility of verification by empirical testing of hypotheses; the value of the humanities which are politics, strategy, and history for defense planning; the use and misuse of analogy; learning from history; why and how strategic history works; and recommendations for the Army. What can be learned from history and what cannot are discussed in this analysis.
Russia's Counterinsurgency in North Caucasus: Performance and Consequences
The North Caucasus region has been a source of instability for the past several centuries. Most recently, Chechen aspirations to achieve full independence after the break-up of the Soviet Union led to two disastrous wars. While the active phase of the Chechen conflict ended in 2000 – more than a decade ago—the underlying social, economic, and political issues of the region remain. A low-level insurgency continues to persist in the North Caucasus region, with occasional terrorist attacks in the Russian heartland. There are few reasons to expect any substantial improvement in the situation for years to come. Chechnya functions as a de facto independent entity; Islamist influence in Dagestan is growing, terror attacks continue, and the rest of the North Caucasus requires massive presence of Russian security services to keep the situation under control. Preventing the North Caucasus from slipping back into greater instability requires tackling corruption, cronyism, discrimination, and unemployment—something the Kremlin has so far not been very willing to do. More international attention and cooperation is necessary to prevent the region from blowing up.
We hope you will enjoy these insightful works and we look forward to your feedback thru Landpower.
Scott