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CNA Strategic Studies Publications
May 1, 2005
The U.S. military responded to international situations, including humanitarian responses, roughly 170 times in the 1970s (that's not 170 situations, but 170 responses -- some in chains for one situation), increasing that total by approximately one-third in the 1980s (to roughly 230 cases) and then again by approximately one-fifth (up to approximately 280 cases) in the 1990s. Add that altogether and you have a grand three-decade total of just under 700 responses, with roughly 40 percent of the responses occurring since the end of the Cold War. This growth represents a significant increases in response totals, but when these cases are weighted in terms of cumulative duration of response by each service, one gets the sense of a far greater increase in U.S. military operations overseas in the 1990s. However, close examination shows that most of the increases in responses are for only four situations: Somalia, Haiti, the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Kosovo), and the Gulf, mostly to do with Iraq, and that actual combat covered only 6 percent of the total days of the post-Cold War period 1989-2001.
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November 1, 2004
The National Intelligence Council (NIC) and specifically the National Intelligence Officer (NIO)for Military Issues asked CNAC to conduct a conference on the changing nature of warfare through 2020 as part of their project on Global Trends 2020. CNAC commissioned 21 papers on various aspects of the subject and convened a conference on 25-26 May 2004 at which the papers were presented and discussed. This document contains a brief summary of the conference, followed by a transcript (not verbatim) of the presentations and discussions, followed by a longer summary of the conference. See also CNAC document CIM D0010879.A1/Final of October 2004, which extends beyond the discussions of the conference to explore the wider range of evolutions of warfare toward the year 2020.
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November 1, 2004
The then-Director of Force Transformation, VADM Arthur Cebrowski, USN (Ret), asked the author of this document to provide views on future fleet architectures, as a contribution to his response to the mandate from Congress for a study on alternative future naval fleet architectures. The outline of this report was dictated to the author by Admiral Cebrowski. His alternative futures were for (1) force building, (2) force operations in "The Gap," that is, across the seam of the world, and (3) force operations in "The Core," that is, the globalized world. He also set out criteria for fleet architectures, to include relevancy, preserving options, transaction rates, learning capability, complexity at scale, entity cost, and risk management. The bottom lines were that future hulls be either light and maneuverable or trucks that could be adapted to changing needs across the years.
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October 1, 2004
In this summary report, we will put the changing nature of warfare as discussed at the conference in to strategic context and extend its implication toward the year 2020.
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October 1, 2004
Capabilities-based planning is advertised as the new approach to planning in the Department of Defense. A simple definition of such planning would be that it should be threat-less and scenario-less. Unfortunately, the new defense planning system requires that the planning be tested in what are essentially "vertical" scenarios, i.e., spikes in time, and this leads to the invention of enemies and threats to fill the scenarios. The main drawback in this is that it is hard to apply such planning to the "horizontal" scenarios the United States now faces, especially the global war on terror, which is expected to last a long time.
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February 1, 2004
On January 16, 2004, we assembled some three dozen U.S. and Canadian uniformed Navy, Coast Guard, and civilian experts in maritime homeland security, USCG matters, naval operations and organization, and the Unified Command Plan to consider present and projected roles of the USCG, U.S. Navy, U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the U.S.-Canadian Bi-National Planning Group and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Industry representatives also participated, providing insights on new surveillance and tracking technologies that enhance maritime domain awareness.
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January 1, 2004
Drs. H. H. Gaffney and Dmitry Gorenburg traveled to Moscow 2-6 November 2003 to talk to a range of Russian strategic thinkers, plus two retired Russian officers. Their mission was to understand the political, economic, and military context in which the Russian Federation Navy was functioning today. They found that the military in general seems to be low in Russian priorities, and that the Russian Federation Navy, despite some increased activity of late, is still shrinking, perhaps to a combination of coastal force and strategic nuclear forces.
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October 1, 2003
Dr. Sergey Rogov, Director of the Institute for USA and Canada Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ISKRAN) and his colleagues from Moscow met with Mr. Robert Murray, President of CNAC, and others from CNAC and the Washington area. The subject of the mini-seminar was the changed strategic situation following the U.S. conquest and occupation of Iraq in early 2003. The fact that the U.S. would be preoccupied with Iraq for some time to come was noted, but the Russians believed that the opportunities for U.S.-Russian collaboration remained open.
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October 1, 2003
Dr. Nosov provides a concise summary of the pressures that Russia has faced from the east and the south, while reaching out toward Europe-which was in large part "the West" until the post-World War II period and the Cold War. Russians agonize more about their relations with the West and about their own identity than we in "the West" do about whether Russia somehow belongs in the West. After all, Russia never had a nation-state of its own until the collapse of the Soviet Union, and has now had only 12 years to sort out an economy and a political system, while being bogged down in Chechnya.
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June 1, 2003
This paper discusses the U.S. Navy's aggressive campaign in the Aegean Sea against Greek pirates who interfered with American shipping during the third decade of the nineteenth century. This campaign was not a particularly important one in the overall history of the U.S. navy, nor did it strongly influence subsequent Greek-American naval relations. Those relations - outlined in the paper - have been largely amicable and even quite close at times, especially following the end of the Cold War. Nevertheless, the Independence for Ottoman Turkey, and of the republic in North America that had itself won its independence less than a century earlier.
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