CIAO DATE: 09/2008
Volume: 7, Issue: 2
Summer 2008
Full Issue (PDF)
Building Defense Institutions: The Broader Context Today (PDF)
Peter Faber
When the Soviet empire imploded, hopes of a post-Westphalian peace first rose, and then fell. The end of history did not come, nor did uncomfortable discontinuities coalesce into new international patterns. In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States, those who hoped for the emergence of new structures of global relations claimed that the interregnum was now over. A clearly definable historical epoch— the Age of Terror—had now emerged. To many observers, however, the years since the 9/11 attacks represent continuity rather than departure. The dissociations and confusions of the interregnum have not disappeared, and one can see terrorism as a feature of this flux rather than its end point. Drifting, in other words, continued to compete with planning; discernible order continued to battle with entropy. If the high priests of pattern identified terrorism as their preferred organizing device in the U.S., advocates of European integration touted their own organizing principle: a trans-European narrative that enjoyed growing acquiescence (if not total uncritical acceptance) throughout the 1990s and early 2000s....
Defense Institution Building in Ukraine (PDF)
Leonid I. Polyakov
It took over sixteen years—from late 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to early 2008 (when this article was written)—for an independent Ukraine to make the transition from the virtual absence of national defense institutions to its current defense establishment, which in many respects is already quite close to modern European and Euroatlantic standards. The purpose of this article is to provide a brief overview and generic analysis of how this happened. That is, it will discuss the defense institution building process in Ukraine, a mid-level European power, which in accordance with national legislation and the declarations of the country’s leadership aims to join both the European Union and NATO.
Building Integrity and Reducing Corruption Risk in Defense Establishments (PDF)
Mark Pyman, Dominic Scott, Alan Waldron, Inese Voika
This article presents some new and constructive approaches to strengthening integrity and reducing corruption risk in defense establishments. Our organization, Transparency International, is active in this field because we believe that it is hugely important to ensure that national defense establishments have integrity and are free from corruption, both for reasons of national security and because of the damage that corruption does to governments and citizens if it is not actively addressed.
Institutionalizing Operations Analysis for Security and Defense in Bulgaria (PDF)
Klaus Niemeyer, Velizar Shalamanov, Todor Tagarev
During the period of preparation for membership and accession to NATO, the administration of the security sector in Bulgaria had very limited access to expertise and tools to support decision making on key functions for the effective management of defense, such as long-term force planning, operations planning, and acquisition management. The institutes that had been responsible for such tasks were closed down as part of the downsizing of the defense establishment in the 1990s. A small number of researchers and analysts were transferred to other defense organizations, primarily to the Defense Advanced Research Institute (DARI), which is part of the “G.S. Rakovski” Defense and Staff College (DSC) in Sofia. Institutes of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS) employed others. The Operations Research (OR) Department in the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics in the BAS was primarily oriented toward theoretical studies and teaching. Some of the legacy software tools for decision support and Computer Assisted Exercises (CAX) packages were also available in DARI, but the level of connection between this institute and the larger civilian operations research community was limited.
This was all that allowed Bulgaria to preserve a limited capacity to support defense decision making, but there were no opportunities to develop new methodologies and tools to address the new challenges to security and the needs of other security sector organizations. Given the lack of infrastructure and the limited access to security organizations, the small Bulgarian operations analysis (OA) community has not been utilized effectively to address the security challenges of the twenty-first century.
Thus, Bulgaria faced considerable challenges in defining its defense requirements as a member of NATO, and later of the EU, developing affordable and interoperable capabilities, promoting inter-agency cooperation, and assuring effective and transparent financial, planning, and resource allocation procedures. At the same time, operations research, modeling, and simulation are an area of active research worldwide with a wide spectrum of applications, including planning, decision support, and conducting exercises. In addition, with the rapid developments in information technology during the past two decades, the methodology of modeling gained an increasingly prominent role in military, economics, social affairs, industry, education and other domains.
NATO Enlargement and Beyond (PDF)
Edwin J. Pechous
The direction of NATO’s future security posture currently hangs in the balance. Efforts for a modest increase in new membership and an expansion of interests and cooperation beyond its present day borders continue unabated. Where this policy will lead is yet to be determined. It is certainly worthwhile for those involved in this planning and strategy development in the next years to pursue a deeper understanding of the most recent enlargement processes from the mid-1990s to 2004—when ten new members entered the Alliance—and the overall NATO/U.S. outreach efforts during the same period of expansion. Our analysis of these endeavors is based on the insight gained from the conduct of 105 conferences with various combinations of the 26 PFP members led by a team from the Institute for Defense Analyses under the sponsorship and guidance of the George C. Marshall Center and the U.S. Department of Defense.
Beyond the RMA: Survival Strategies for Small Defense Economies (PDF)
Ron Matthews, Curie Maharani
Life was straightforward during the Cold War. There were the big guys in the bi-polar strategic stand-off—the United States and the Soviet Union—and there were the little guys: the Eastern European countries, such as Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia; Chile in Latin America; Spain in Southern Europe; Sweden in Scandinavia; Israel in the Middle East; and Singapore in the Far East. All these countries, big or small, capitalist or communist, possessed comprehensive and diversified defense industrial bases. However, times have changed, and in some senses they have changed dramatically. More than anything else, economics does not favor small countries. Previously, Cold War doctrine was premised on mass formations of artillery, main battle groups of tanks and combat aircraft located on the Central European front. In the twenty-first century, these formations have disappeared. Militaries have been transformed by the need to respond to new, emerging, asymmetrical threats arising anywhere across the globe, a shift that is captured under the umbrella term of the “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA). Contemporary doctrine focuses on high-intensity warfare, characterized by sophisticated defense systems, such as telemetry and cruise missiles, fiber optic technologies, sensors, modern telecommunication systems, “stealth” coatings of modern weapon platforms, light-weight composite materials, and the miniaturization of technologies in, for instance, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
Sami Faltas, Merijn Hartog
For the last two years the Center for European Security Studies (CESS) has demonstrated that training can serve as a useful tool to actively stimulate democratic governance in the security sectors of transitional countries in the former Soviet Union. Between 2006 and February 2008, CESS implemented a program called Starlink in five PfP countries in Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. The Starlink program (which is short for Security, Transparency, Accountability and Reform: Linking the Security Sectors of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine to the European Mainstream) was designed to help connect the beneficiary countries to the wider European security community by promoting reforms and democratic governance of the security sector. More specifically, the focus is the development and delivery of training materials and courses for key groups in the countries concerned. While Starlink pays specific and separate attention to various communities within the security sector—such as military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies—it adopts a comprehensive, or “whole government” approach, emphasizing the need for close cooperation and coordination between these communities. The Starlink program was subsidized by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs; in Armenia and Azerbaijan, the local OSCE missions kindly cofinanced Starlink.
In this article we will deal with CESS’ Starlink program, its focus on training courses and modules, the added value of simulation exercises, and the purpose of the program: the promotion of democratic governance, with a special emphasis on the security sector. We will also draw lessons learned from the original Starlink program. In our conclusion, we will look at the options for Starlink’s future. Besides discussing its possible outreach and scope, we will demonstrate the contribution of Starlink to international security sector initiatives, such as the OECD’s DAC handbook and NATO’s PAP-DIB.
Applying a New Management Model in the Joint Staff: An Executive Summary (PDF)
Francois Melese
Agencies throughout the federal government face the same basic set of management challenges: accountability, or tracking government spending on inputs; efficiency, or minimizing the costs of government activities; and effectiveness, or measuring outputs/ outcomes and tying budgets to performance. A key objective in shifting government’s focus from inputs to activities/outputs is to promote more robust cost-effectiveness analyses to improve agency investments and support Congressional decision making.
The challenge is that, at best, most Department of Defense (DoD) accounting systems track expenditures on inputs. Many were neither designed nor intended to report expenditures by activities or outputs. This challenge is especially acute for activities that cut across military services, like the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Joint Exercise Program (JEP). To assist the Joint Staff to address these challenges, an ongoing project commissioned by the Joint Staff Comptroller leverages a new integrated public management model called the “Super-Unified Customer and Cost Evaluation Strategic System” (SUCCESS). Guided by SUCCESS, the J7/JEP and Joint Staff Comptroller teams are currently integrating and mapping U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Army data by individual exercise. This ongoing initiative is building a foundation for future analysis and evaluation of the efficiency and effectiveness of joint exercise activities.
Assessing the Status of PAP-DIB Implementation (PDF)
Hari Bucur-Marcu
Four years have already passed since the heads of state and government convened in the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC) at the NATO Istanbul Summit and endorsed the Partnership Action Plan–Defense Institution Building (PAP-DIB). Since that meeting, the Partner nations have embarked on political and conceptual endeavors to implement the ten objectives laid out in the PAP-DIB document as they felt appropriate, and at their own speed. This article will outline some considerations on how the achievements of any Partner nation in PAP-DIB implementation can be assessed.
Civilians in Defense Ministries (PDF)
Todor Tagarev
It is a truism to say that healthy civil-military relations are indispensable for keeping defense establishments accountable to society. In addition, there is a growing understanding that smooth interaction between civilians and the military is key if we wish to keep the armed forces effective in implementing a country’s security and defense policy within limited budgets.
It is clear who the military are: men and women at arms ready to protect the nation and its allies from risks and threats of organized violence that may originate close to or very far away from the territory of their own country or the territory of allies. But what is the meaning of civilian, or defense civilian, in discussing civil-military relations?
This essay examines the issue of civilians in a defense establishment. First, it presents the factors that drive the involvement of civilians in defense and points out some common perceptions, or rather misperceptions, in Central and Eastern European countries. Next, it offers a classification of civilian personnel in defense. Then it examines the profession of “defense civilian” vis-à-vis the military profession. Finally, it presents a few ideas that, if properly implemented, will contribute to the establishment of a professional corps of civilian defense experts.
The Institutionalization of Security Risk Assessment (PDF)
Hari Bucur-Marcu
When discussing the institutionalization of security risk assessment, the first reference that comes to mind is the NATO initiative that bears most directly on the subject, the Partnership Action Plan for Defense Institution Building (PAP-DIB).1 In this document, the fourth objective calls for the development of “effective and transparent arrangements and procedures to assess security risks and national defense requirements.” A reader of this objective would recognize that the phrase “arrangements and procedures” stands for the broader category of “institutions,” and that the requirements for such institutions are effectiveness and transparency, for both the process of security risk assessment and the process of defining defense requirements. This article will discuss the significance of these requirements for the creation of institutions to assess security risks.
Office of Security Sector Reform (OSSR): Joint Force Command Naples (JFCN) (PDF)
The Office of Security Sector Reform was established in the Joint Force Command Naples in March 2006, and is staffed by a mixture of military and civilian staff. This article explains the role of the Office and how it operates. Security Sector Reform (SSR) in the Western Balkans is now a major line of operation for the Joint Force Command Naples, a NATO operational headquarters. The Office of Security Sector Reform is focused geographically on the three Membership Action Plan countries (Albania, Croatia, and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) in the region and the three new Partnership for Peace countries (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Serbia).
While formal policies for SSR are still being developed by NATO Headquarters, the SSR Office in Naples pursues practical and deliberate actions to assist NATO’s partner and aspiring member nations in the development of their security sectors and armed forces. The successful reform of a state’s security sector requires a long-term approach to create effective, modern, and sustainable armed forces, a change that is delivered through national strategies (often including a Strategic Defense Review) and a transformation plan based on the strategy. It is important that ownership of the strategy and plan remain with the nation, not NATO.