This book examines the role of risk management in the recent financial crisis and applies lessons from there to the national security realm. It rethinks the way risk contributes to strategy, with insights relevant to practitioners and scholars in national security as well as business. Over the past few years, the concept of risk has become one of the most commonly discussed issues in national security planning. And yet the experiences of the 2007-2008 financial crisis demonstrated critical limitations in institutional efforts to control risk. The most elaborate and complex risk procedures could not cure skewed incentives, cognitive biases, groupthink, and a dozen other human factors that led companies to take excessive risk. By embracing risk management, the national security enterprise may be turning to a discipline just as it has been discredited.

Desert Storm aims to examine the lessons of the Gulf War from a high-level, strategic defense perspective. It opens up an informed debate concerning the true military and geopolitical lessons of the conflict.

This book is the product of a continuing joint effort by the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses and the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies to find roads to a lasting settlement of the dangerous intra-Korean confrontation.

From Saddam Hussein's first bold threats in 1990 to the stunning ground phase of Desert Storm in early 1991, the crisis in the Gulf captured the world's attention. This high-tech, low-cost war was televised nightly from beginning to end, accompanied by on-the-spot interpretations of strategy and its implications. But what did we learn from this crisis? Did the United States bungle its attempts at discouraging Saddam's aggressive actions, or is deterrence simply not a reliable foreign policy tool? Are chemical weapons truly the "poor man's atom bomb"? Does the war represent a good model for future crises, or did circumstances make this war more of an anomaly than a precedent? How did the ail-volunteer U.S. force perform? By combining exciting, detailed vignettes of the crisis with insightful discussions of its consequences, this book opens up an informed debate concerning the true military and geopolitical lessons of the conflict. Representing a distillation of the best thinking on defense and foreign policy in Washington, Desert Storm also incorporates the testimony of the inside players during the crisis-the people who actually planned and fought the war. Combining academic rigor and in-depth military expertise, the authors challenge the complacency of the emerging conventional wisdom regarding the conflict, taking us beyond mere chronicling and instant analysis to a riveting reenactment of the war and the serious consideration of its long-term implications.

This book is the product of a continuing joint effort by the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses and the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies to find roads to a lasting settlement of the dangerous intra-Korean confrontation.

Nuclear Weapons in a Transformed World sets out to examine one of the most pressing issues of the twenty-first century: the future of nuclear weapons. Acknowledging the growing consensus that pushing nuclear weapons to the margins of world politics would represent the wisest political and moral choice for the United States, a stellar group of scholars has been assembled in this volume to analyze one solution to the problem: virtual nuclear arsenals. First proposed by Jonathan Schell in his 1984 book The Abolition , this option involves removing all nuclear weapons from operational status and placing them in a dismantled, 'virtual' condition. Essays by many of the world's top experts on arms control and international relations combine to offer the first detailed assessment of what may be the most promising and provocative idea in the field today. Thorough, balanced, and probing, Nuclear Weapons in a Transformed World opens the debate on a concept which could possibly determine the future of arms control and US policy.

This book examines the role of risk management in the recent financial crisis and applies lessons from there to the national security realm. It rethinks the way risk contributes to strategy, with insights relevant to practitioners and scholars in national security as well as business. Over the past few years, the concept of risk has become one of the most commonly discussed issues in national security planning. And yet the experiences of the 2007-2008 financial crisis demonstrated critical limitations in institutional efforts to control risk. The most elaborate and complex risk procedures could not cure skewed incentives, cognitive biases, groupthink, and a dozen other human factors that led companies to take excessive risk. By embracing risk management, the national security enterprise may be turning to a discipline just as it has been discredited.

A sense of malaise and uncertainty surrounds the so-called war on terror. This volume offers a bold rethinking of the central challenge in that conflict: the rise of radical Islamism. Mazarr argues that this movement represents the latest in a series of anti-modern political and philosophical rebellions: in its causes, the shape of its ideology, and its social consequences, the movement shares much in common with German fascism, Russian revolutionary doctrines, and Japanese imperialist nationalism. The book builds a model of how anti-modern movements arise and suggests broader truths about the changing character of world politics and the psychological basis of national security in a globalized world. It concludes with a critique of the war on terror as currently pursued and a wide-ranging proposal for a strikingly different approach to the challenge of this latest challenge to modernity.

A sense of malaise and uncertainty surrounds the so-called war on terror. This volume offers a bold rethinking of the central challenge in that conflict: the rise of radical Islamism. Mazarr argues that this movement represents the latest in a series of anti-modern political and philosophical rebellions: in its causes, the shape of its ideology, and its social consequences, the movement shares much in common with German fascism, Russian revolutionary doctrines, and Japanese imperialist nationalism. The book builds a model of how anti-modern movements arise and suggests broader truths about the changing character of world politics and the psychological basis of national security in a globalized world. It concludes with a critique of the war on terror as currently pursued and a wide-ranging proposal for a strikingly different approach to the challenge of this latest challenge to modernity.

This unique collection of essays explores the intricacies of how the Internet has changed the way we currently approach international security, civil society, and economic development. The contributors move past the conventional wisdom, tapping new and original sources to investigate new and unexpected developments. One essay explores how wiring Russia's nuclear scientists into the Internet increases the threat of weapons proliferation. Another looks at Internet-enabled development projects and, despite early success stories in Bangalore, India, explains why they will fail. Together the essays in this collection try to bring a dose of reality to the rose-colored futures many have predicted for world politics in the Information Age.

This book offers the first in-depth history of the greatest diplomatic challenge in the post-Cold War era-the North Korean nuclear program and the US and allied efforts to stop it. Michael J. Mazarr explains why North Korea may believe it needs nuclear weapons and how the US has tried to thwart its plans.