Neither the United States nor Russia wants to see Afghanistan become a haven for international terrorist groups. For now, Russia is taking a pragmatic approach to the Taliban in that it has a relationship with the group that the United States does not.
As targets of information aggression, the United States and its European allies must protect themselves against the effects of psychological manipulation and influence. The authors describe apparent efforts by Russia and its agents to use information to shape Russia's operating environment, and they identify possible defensive approaches for United States European Command and its partners.
Understanding Russia's grand strategy can help U.S. decisionmakers assess the depth and nature of potential conflicts between Russia and the United States and avoid strategic surprise by better-anticipating Moscow's actions and reactions. The authors of this report review Russia's declared grand strategy, evaluate the extent to which Russian behavior is consistent with stated strategy, and outline implications for the United States.
The 2018 U.S. National Defense Strategy instructed the U.S. military to become more operationally unpredictable and suggested that doing so would help the United States deter attacks on U.S. partners. The authors of this report assess whether and how the U.S. military might utilize unpredictability in force employment, posture, and operations to deter adversaries and identify the possible risks of such approaches.
This brief assesses how the United States might deter adversaries from attacking U.S. allies by increasing adversary uncertainty about how the United States would fight.
In this Perspective, the authors assess the effects and implications of COVID-19 on strategic competition in sub-Saharan Africa thus far and offer recommendations for how the United States can expand beyond a competition lens and help African countries respond to the pandemic in ways that are mutually beneficial to all parties.
Russia and China have sought to modernize their legacy defense equipment while concurrently developing new and increasingly sophisticated systems of their own. This report discusses recent research into the research, development, and acquisition processes of Russia and China—both doctrinally and in practice—and identifies areas in which each country excels and where each country has challenges.
In 2018, the U.S. National Defense Strategy formally codified the latest shift in threat perceptions, heralding Russia as one of the "principal priorities" for the U.S. Department of Defense. In this Perspective, the authors illuminate the implications of a conventional military confrontation between NATO and Russia in Europe and the associated risk of nuclear escalation.
This perspective informs the subject of Russia's global ambitions and actions—its key interests and objectives and its foreign policy approaches to pursuing or protecting them. Recognizing Russia's global interests and its opportunistic approach to bilateral relationships can help the United States implement its current global strategy while developing a more holistic global response.
To help audiences make sense of the large array of counterdisinformation recommendations, the authors of this report coded recommendations in 64 other policy reports into such categories as social media platform policies, U.S. and allied government policies, awareness and education recommendations, and recommendations for supporting various media and media content. The authors then assessed which recommendations benefit from researcher consensus.
