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Army Reserve Component units experience widespread personnel turnover as they approach mobilization and deployment, prompting many units to schedule intensive training just before mobilization in order to get all soldiers prepared for deployment.
The Afghan government and NATO can improve security in Afghanistan by leveraging traditional policing institutions in rural villages and mobilizing the population against insurgents.
The rising number of terrorist plots in the United States with links to Pakistan – most recently the failed car-bombing in New York City – is partly a result of an unsuccessful strategy by Pakistan and the U.S. to weaken the range of militant groups operating in Pakistan.
While U.S. government officials working in Iraq believe the use of armed private security contractors has been a useful strategy, many worry that the contractors have not always had a positive effect on U.S. foreign policy objectives.
The increased use of cash bonuses by the U.S. Department of Defense to encourage military enlistment and reenlistment had a positive effect on recruiting and retention in the armed forces.
Effective intelligence gathering and a Muslim community unsympathetic to calls to violence have discouraged homegrown jihadist terrorism in the United States.
Armed conflict between the government of Yemen and an opposition movement in the nation's north has spilled across its borders into Saudi Arabia, posing a potential threat to U.S. interests.
From the lessons of the Vietnam War to the recent downfall of the Tamil Tigers in Southeast Asia, conflicts between insurgencies and governments tend to follow certain patterns as they arc toward their endings.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq and the ensuing conflict in that country fostered the rise of Iranian power in the region, but with more limitations than is commonly acknowledged. It also diminished local confidence in U.S. credibility and created opportunities for China and Russia.
As it withdraws troops from Iraq, the United States must work not only to maintain security in that nation, but also focus on how the action will impact other regional interests.
The United States can take a major step in improving the security environment in the Middle East and Persian Gulf by giving new impetus to revitalizing its security partnership with Turkey.
U.S. policymakers should take a nuanced view of Iran's complex system of government and politics when crafting foreign policy decisions about the Islamic Republic.
NATO is rethinking its future direction for the first time since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a process that could redirect the Cold War alliance toward contemporary security issues like cyberthreats and piracy, and strengthen its commitment to fragile states like Afghanistan.
Children in military families may suffer from more emotional and behavioral difficulties when compared to other American youths, with older children and girls struggling the most when a parent is deployed overseas.
Because it will be difficult to prevent cyber attacks on critical civilian and military computer networks by threatening to punish attackers, the United States must focus its efforts on defending these networks from cyber attack.
Although U.S. Army deployments have been linked positively to the likelihood of reenlisting for much of the past decade, by 2006 the mounting burden of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan reached the point where deployment had a negative effect on reenlistment.
At the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Coalition forces classified the Mujahedin-e Khalq, a militant organization from Iran with cult-like elements that advocates the overthrow of Iran's current government, as an enemy force. A new study looks at how coalition forces handled this group following the invasion.
The U.S. military can meet President Obama's timeline for the drawdown of troops from Iraq, but it is crucial that sufficient combat force remains in place to ensure a peaceful election scheduled for January 2010, according to a new RAND Corporation study that examines three alternatives for withdrawing U.S. military personnel from Iraq.
Iran's rise as a regional power presents a key foreign policy and security challenge to the United States, but its reach may be more limited than Western conventional wisdom suggests, according to a RAND Corporation study issued today. U.S. strategy must recognize Iran's role as an influential, but not omnipotent, player in the Middle East and work to exploit existing barriers to Iran's harmful activities, while simultaneously seeking areas of engagement.
The record of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein compares favorably to that of many other U.S. efforts at post-conflict reconstruction, particularly in the areas of economic and public reforms. However, these achievements were undermined and overshadowed by the U.S. failure to protect the Iraqi population from the criminals and extremists among them who pulled Iraq into civil war.
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