No external observer knows more about Myanmar's security and intelligence apparatus than Andrew Selth. In this book he presents an account of the structure and functions of Myanmar's deep state, along with a tale of personal ambition, rivalry and ruthless power politics worthy of John Le Carre. A thoroughly educative, entertaining and intriguing read."" - Professor Michael Wesley, Dean, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University ""Andrew Selth has once again amply illustrated the depth and penetration of his study of Myanmar/Burma and its institutions. This work on the more recent aspects of the country's intelligence apparatus goes beyond a masterful and comprehensive analysis of the Burmese intelligence community, and probes the social and institutional bases of the attitudes giving rise to that critical aspect of power. We are once again in Dr Selth's debt. This is required reading for serious observers of the Burmese scene."" - David I. Steinberg, Distinguished Professor of Asian Studies Emeritus, Georgetown University ""By lifting the lid on a pervasive yet secretive intelligence apparatus, Andrew Selth makes an outstanding contribution to Myanmar Studies. For scholars and practitioners alike, this book provides an essential history of a security state that remains powerful even during the transition away from overt authoritarian rule."" - Professor Ian Holliday, Vice-President (Teaching and Learning), The University of Hong Kong

Now, for the first time, Robert K. DeArment has told the full story of George Scarborough's life, illuminating his activity as a lawman during the final part of the nineteenth century and his controversial killings while wearing the badge-he was tried for murder on three occasions and acquitted each time.

The Coast Guard, within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is charged with preventing loss of life, injury, and property damage in the maritime environment through its SAR mission. It maintains over 200 stations with various assets, such as boats and helicopters (depending on the station), along U.S. coasts and inland waterways to carry out this mission, as well as its other missions such as maritime security. Chapter 1 will review: the status of the Coast Guard's recapitalisation program; new technologies that could assist the Coast Guard; maintenance requirements of its ageing vessels; operating costs for the new vessels; and shoreside infrastructure needs and priorities. The Coast Guard's missions in the Arctic include: defense readiness, ice operations, marine environmental protection, and ports, waterways and coastal security. Chapter 2 discusses the Coast Guard's Arctic capabilities. Chapter 3 addresses the extent to which the Coast Guard has (1) a sound process for analysing the need for its boat stations and (2) taken actions to implement its boat station process results.

Defence is the ultimate public good, and it thus falls to government to determine the appropriate amount of public revenue to commit to the defence of the realm. This will depend on history, strategic threat, international security obligations, entreaties from allies and, of course, the threat faced. The Political Economy of Defence is structured to identify, explain and analyse the policy, process and problems that government faces from the starting point of national security through to the ultimate objective of securing a peaceful world. Accordingly, it provides insights into how defence budgets are determined and managed, offering relevant and refreshingly practical policy perspectives on defence finance, defence and development trade-offs, sovereignty vs globalisation debates, and many other pertinent issues. It will appeal to policymakers, analysts, graduate students and academics interested in defence economics, political economy, public economics and public policy.

The Thai military's Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC) was in charge of a wide range of civil affairs projects during the country's struggle with the communist insurgency between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s. These projects - including rural development programmes, mass organizations and mobilization campaigns, and psychological operations - provided justification for the military to routinely penetrate the socio-political sphere. Since the Cold War drew to a close, little attention has been paid to ISOC's role and power within the state apparatus. Since the coups of September 2006 and May 2014 that toppled the elected governments, ISOC has been dangerously empowered and increasingly employed by the military regimes to dictate the country's political direction. The power of the Thai military is exerted not only through its use of force but also by means of its socio-political arms. ISOC represents a potent tool with which conservative elites can undermine and control electoral democracy and through which the military can maintain its power.

Following terrorist attacks against the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983, the U.S. Department of State began an embassy construction program -- known as the Inman program -- to protect U.S. personnel. However, the U.S. Department of State completed only 24 of the 57 planned construction projects, in part due to poor planning, systemic weaknesses in program management, difficulties acquiring sites, schedule delays, cost increases, and subsequent funding limitations. Following the demise of the Inman program in the early 1990s, very few new construction projects were initiated until after the two 1998 embassy bombings in Africa. Following those attacks, the Secure Embassy Construction and Counterterrorism Act of 1999 required the U.S. Department of State to maintain a list of diplomatic facilities to be scheduled for replacement based on their vulnerability to attack. The U.S. Department of State determined that diplomatic facilities at over 180 posts -- more than half of U.S. overseas missions -- needed to be replaced to meet security standards. By 2016, over 30,000 staff were moved into more secure facilities. From October 2012 to September 2016, State evacuated overseas post staff and family members from 23 overseas posts in response to various threats, such as terrorism, civil unrest, and natural disasters. Overseas posts undergoing evacuations generally experience authorised departure or ordered departure of specific post staff or family members, potentially leading to suspended operations. On 29 September 2017 the U.S. Department of State ordered the departure of nonemergency personnel assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba, as well as their families, in order to minimise the risk of their exposure to harm because of a series of unexplained injuries suffered by embassy personnel since November 2016.

The United States has poured over a billion dollars into a network of interagency intelligence centers called "fusion centers." These centers were ostensibly set up to prevent terrorism, but politicians, the press, and policy advocates have criticized them for failing on this account. So why do these security systems persist? Pacifying the Homeland travels inside the secret world of intelligence fusion, looks beyond the apparent failure of fusion centers, and reveals a broader shift away from mass incarceration and toward a more surveillance- and police-intensive system of social regulation. Provided with unprecedented access to domestic intelligence centers, Brendan McQuade uncovers how the institutionalization of intelligence fusion enables decarceration without fully addressing the underlying social problems at the root of mass incarceration. The result is a startling analysis that contributes to the debates on surveillance, mass incarceration, and policing and challenges readers to see surveillance, policing, mass incarceration, and the security state in an entirely new light.

The rise of China will undoubtedly be one of the great spectacles of the twenty-first century. More than a dramatic symbol of the redistribution of global wealth, the event has marked the end of the unipolar international system and the arrival of a new era in world politics. How the security, stability and legitimacy built upon foundations that were suddenly shifting, adapting to this new reality is the subject of Will China's Rise be Peaceful? Bringing together the work of seasoned experts and younger scholars, this volume offers an inclusive examination of the effects of historical patterns-whether interrupted or intact-by the rise of China. The contributors show how strategies among the major powers are guided by existing international rules and expectations as well as by the realities created by an increasingly powerful China. While China has sought to signal its non-revisionist intent its extraordinary economic growth and active diplomacy has in a short time span transformed global and East Asian politics. This has caused constant readjustments as the other key actors have responded to the changing incentives provided by Chinese policies. Will China's Rise be Peaceful? explores these continuities and discontinuities in five areas: theory, history, domestic politics, regional politics, and great power politics. Equally grounded in theory and extensive empirical research, this timely volume offers a remarkably lucid description and interpretation of our changing international relations. In both its approach and its conclusions, it will serve as a model for the study of China in a new era.

National security has been at the forefront of the Israeli experience for seven decades, with threats ranging from terrorism, to vast rocket and missile arsenals, and even existential nuclear dangers. Yet, despite its overwhelming preoccupation with foreign and defense affairs, Israel does not have a formal national security strategy. In Israeli National Security, Chuck Freilich presents an authoritative analysis of the military, diplomatic, demographic, and societal challenges Israel faces today, to propose a comprehensive and long-term Israeli national security strategy. The heart of the new strategy places greater emphasis on restraint, defense, and diplomacy as means of addressing the challenges Israel faces, along with the military capacity to deter and, if necessary, defeat Israel's adversaries, while also maintaining the resolve of its society. By bringing Israel's most critical debates about the Palestinians, demography, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, US relations and nuclear strategy into sharp focus, the strategy Freilich proposes addresses the primary challenges Israel must address in order to chart its national course. The most comprehensive study of Israel's national security to date, this book presents the first public proposal for a comprehensive Israeli national security strategy and prescribes an actionable course forward.

U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) and U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM) are updating their existing civil support plans to include a complex catastrophe scenario, as directed by the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Staff. However, the commands are delaying the identification of capabilities that could be provided to execute the plans until the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the lead federal response agency, completes its regional planning efforts in 2018. This book assesses the extent to which DOD has planned for and identified capabilities to respond to complex catastrophes; and established a command and control construct for complex catastrophes and other multistate incidents. It also establishes Department of Defense (DoD) priorities in the areas of homeland defense and defense support of civil authorities through 2020, consistent with the president's National Security Strategy and the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance.

A most timely publication in view of current concerns about snooping. Thomas Mathiesen describes how the major databases of Europe have become interlinked and accessible to diverse organizations and third States; meaning that, largely unchallenged, a 'Surveillance Monster' now threatens rights, freedoms, democracy and the Rule of Law. As information is logged on citizens' every move, data flows across borders via systems soon to be under central, global or even non-State control. Secret plans happen behind closed doors and 'systems func tionaries' become defensive of their own role. Goals expand and entire processes are shrouded in mystery. Alongside the integration of automated systems sits a weakening of State ties as the Prum Treaty and Schengen Convention lead to systems lacking transparency, restraint or Parliamentary scrutiny. As Mathiesen explains, the intention may have been fighting terrorism or organized crime, but the means have become disproportionate, unaccountable, over-expensive and lacking in results which ordinary vigilance and sound intelligence in communities should provide.

The Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) mission includes law enforcement elements, which require the department, through its components, to manage various types of firearms. DHS's annual ammunition purchases have declined since fiscal year 2009 and are comparable in number to the Department of Justice's (DOJ) ammunition purchases. In fiscal year 2013, DHS purchased 84 million rounds of ammunition, which is less than DHS's ammunition purchases over the past 5 fiscal years. DHS component officials said the decline in ammunition purchases in fiscal year 2013 was primarily a result of budget constraints, which meant reducing the number of training classes, and drawing on their ammunition inventories. This book addresses trends in DHS's ammunition purchases since fiscal year 2008, how DHS's purchases compare with DOJ's, and what factors affect DHS's purchase decisions.

According to Homeland Security Presidential Directive 10 (HSPD-10): Biodefense for the 21st Century, a national bioawareness capability providing early warning, detection, or recognition of a biological weapon attack is an essential component of biodefense. To contribute to this national capability, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) operates the BioWatch program, which uses routine laboratory testing designed to detect an aerosolised biological attack for five specific biological agents considered high risk for use as biological weapons. The BioWatch program is a federally-managed, locally operated system with collectors deployed primarily in outdoor locations in more than 30 major metropolitan areas. This book provides an overview of the BioWatch Generation-3 Acquisition program with a focus on meeting mission needs for effective biosurveillance.

The deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. personnel in Benghazi, Libya, on 11 September 2012, along with attacks on U.S. embassies in Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, and Yemen, have drawn renewed attention to the challenges facing U.S. diplomats abroad, as well as to the difficulty in balancing concerns for their security against the outreach required of their mission. Congress plays a key role in shaping the response to these challenges, such as by providing resources for diplomatic security and examining security breaches overseas. The inability to provide perfect security, especially against the evident threat of mob violence, has focused particular scrutiny on the deployment of diplomatic personnel in high-threat environments. This book provides background information on the authorities, regulations, and procedures in place at the Department of State regarding diplomatic security with additional discussion on embassy security funding trends.

This book provides background information and potential oversight issues for Congress on the Coast Guard's programs for procuring eight National Security Cutters, 25 Offshore Patrol Cutters, and 58 Fast Response Cutters. These 91 planned cutters are intended as replacements for 90 ageing Coast Guard cutters and patrol craft. Additionally discussed is the sustainment and modernization of the Coast Guard's polar icebreaker fleet, which performs a variety of missions supporting U.S. interests in polar regions. The issue for Congress is whether to approve, reject, or modify Coast Guard funding and modernization requests and acquisition strategies. Congressional decisions could affect the Coast Guard's capabilities and funding requirements, the performance of polar missions and the U.S. shipbuilding industrial base.