Dean Carol Lancaster

Voice of America Host Carol Castiel interviews Georgetown University School of Foreign Service Dean Carol Lancaster and me about foreign policy challenges for the United States in 2012. Areas discussed include: China, Iran, the Arab world, Latin America, and the US defense budget.

From Faith Complex, a series of Georgetown’s Program on Jewish Civilization:

On May 2, 2011, Navy SEALS cornered and killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, nearly ten years after the so-called War on Terror was first declared. Bin Laden’s death leaves unanswered questions such as: Who will inherit al-Qaeda’s leadership? What is the future of the Taliban insurgency? And will this lead to greater stability in the region? Bruce Hoffman joins Professor Sarah Fainberg to discuss these problematics in this Faith Complex.

Dr. Hoffman is Director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies and Director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University, where he also teaches courses on counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency in the Walsh School of Foreign Service. Dr. Hoffman has studied terrorism for more than thirty years and has written extensively on the subject. His most recent book is Inside Terrorism, which analyzes shifts in both foreign and domestic terrorism since the September 11th attacks.

Professor Bruce Hoffman

Read more about Bruce Hoffman

Articles by Bruce Hoffman for Foreign Affairs

Professor Hoffman’s publications for RAND Corporation

Bruce Hoffman’s blog at The National Interest

Professor Phillip A. Karber and his class

Check out this excellent article in the Washington Post about my friend and Georgetown colleague, Phill Karber’s Georgetown class. William Wan writes:

The Chinese have called it their “Underground Great Wall” — a vast network of tunnels designed to hide their country’s increasingly sophisticated missile and nuclear arsenal.

For the past three years, a small band of obsessively dedicated students at Georgetown University has called it something else: homework.

Led by their hard-charging professor, a former top Pentagon official, they have translated hundreds of documents, combed through satellite imagery, obtained restricted Chinese military documents and waded through hundreds of gigabytes of online data.

The result of their effort? The largest body of public knowledge about thousands of miles of tunnels dug by the Second Artillery Corps, a secretive branch of the Chinese military in charge of protecting and deploying its ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads.

The study is yet to be released, but already it has sparked a congressional hearing and been circulated among top officials in the Pentagon, including the Air Force vice chief of staff.

Most of the attention has focused on the 363-page study’s provocative conclusion — that China’s nuclear arsenal could be many times larger than the well-established estimates of arms-control experts.

“It’s not quite a bombshell, but those thoughts and estimates are being checked against what people think they know based on classified information,” said a Defense Department strategist who would discuss the study only on the condition of anonymity.

The study’s critics, however, have questioned the unorthodox Internet-based research of the students, who drew from sources as disparate as Google Earth, blogs, military journals and, perhaps most startlingly, a fictionalized TV docudrama about Chinese artillery soldiers — the rough equivalent of watching Fox’s TV show “24” for insights into U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

But the strongest condemnation has come from nonproliferation experts who worry that the study could fuel arguments for maintaining nuclear weapons in an era when efforts are being made to reduce the world’s post-Cold War stockpiles.

Beyond its impact in the policy world, the project has made a profound mark on the students — including some who have since graduated and taken research jobs with the Defense Department and Congress.

“I don’t even want to know how many hours I spent on it,” said Nick Yarosh, 22, an international politics senior at Georgetown. “But you ask people what they did in college, most just say I took this class, I was in this club. I can say I spent it reading Chinese nuclear strategy and Second Artillery manuals. For a nerd like me, that really means something.”

For students, an obsession

The students’ professor, Phillip A. Karber, 65, had spent the Cold War as a top strategist reporting directly to the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But it was his early work in defense that cemented his reputation, when he led an elite research team created by Henry Kissinger, who was then the national security adviser, to probe the weaknesses of Soviet forces.

Karber prided himself on recruiting the best intelligence analysts in the government. “You didn’t just want the highest-ranking or brightest guys, you wanted the ones who were hungry,” he said.

In 2008, Karber was volunteering on a committee for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a Pentagon agency charged with countering weapons of mass destruction.

After a devastating earthquake struck Sichuan province, the chairman of Karber’s committee noticed Chinese news accounts reporting that thousands of radiation technicians were rushing to the region. Then came pictures of strangely collapsed hills and speculation that the caved-in tunnels in the area had held nuclear weapons.

Find out what’s going on, the chairman asked Karber, who began looking for analysts again — this time among his students at Georgetown.

The first inductees came from his arms-control classes. Each semester, he set aside a day to show them tantalizing videos and documents he had begun gathering on the tunnels. Then he concluded with a simple question: What do you think it means?

“The fact that there were no answers to that really got to me,” said former student Dustin Walker, 22. “It started out like any other class, tests on this day or that, but people kept coming back, even after graduation. . . . We spent hours on our own outside of class on this stuff.”

The students worked in their dorms translating military texts. They skipped movie nights for marathon sessions reviewing TV clips of missiles being moved from one tunnel structure to another. While their friends read Shakespeare, they gathered in the library to war-game worst-case scenarios of a Chinese nuclear strike on the United States.

Over time, the team grew from a handful of contributors to roughly two dozen. Most spent their time studying the subterranean activities of the Second Artillery Corps.

While the tunnels’ existence was something of an open secret among the handful of experts studying China’s nuclear arms, almost no papers or public reports on the structures existed.

So the students turned to publicly available Chinese sources — military journals, local news reports and online photos posted by Chinese citizens. It helped that China’s famously secretive military was beginning to release more information, driven by its leaders’ eagerness to show off China’s growing power to its citizens.

The Internet also generated a raft of leads: new military forums, blogs and once-obscure local TV reports now posted on the Chinese equivalents of YouTube. Strategic string searches even allowed the students to get behind some military Web sites and download documents such as syllabuses taught at China’s military academies.

Drudgery and discoveries

The main problem was the sheer amount of translation required.

Each semester, Karber managed to recruit only one or two Chinese-speaking students. So the team assembled a makeshift system to scan images of the books and documents they found. Using text-capture software, they converted those pictures into Chinese characters, which were fed into translation software to produce crude English versions. From those, they highlighted key passages for finer translation by the Chinese speakers.

The downside was the drudgery — hours feeding pages into the scanner. The upside was that after three years, the students had compiled a searchable database of more than 1.4 million words on the Second Artillery and its tunnels.

By combining everything they found in the journals, video clips, satellite imagery and photos, they were able to triangulate the location of several tunnel structures, with a rough idea of what types of missiles were stored in each.

Their work also yielded smaller revelations: how the missiles were kept mobile and transported from structure to structure, as well as tantalizing images and accounts of a “missile train” and disguised passenger rail cars to move China’s long-range missiles.

To facilitate the work, Karber set up research rooms for the students at his home in Great Falls. He bought Apple computers and large flat-screen monitors for their video work and obtained small research grants for those who wanted to work through the summer. When work ran late, many crashed in his basement’s spare room.

“I got fat working on this thing because I didn’t go to the gym anymore. It was that intense,” said Yarosh, who has continued on the project this year not for credit but purely as a hobby. “It’s not the typical college course. Dr. Karber just tells you the objective and gives you total freedom to figure out how to get there. That level of trust can be liberating.”

Some of the biggest breakthroughs came after members of Karber’s team used personal connections in China to obtain a 400-page manual produced by the Second Artillery and usually available only to China’s military personnel.

Another source of insight was a pair of semi-fictionalized TV series chronicling the lives of Second Artillery soldiers.

The plots were often overwrought with melodrama — one series centers on a brigade commander who struggles to whip his slipshod unit into shape while juggling relationship problems with his glamorous Olympic-swim-coach girlfriend. But they also included surprisingly accurate depictions of artillery units’ procedures that lined up perfectly with the military manual and other documents.

“Until someone showed us on screen how exactly these missile deployments were done from the tunnels, we only had disparate pieces. The TV shows gave us the big picture of how it all worked together,” Karber said.

A bigger Chinese arsenal?

In December 2009, just as the students began making progress, the Chinese military admitted for the first time that the Second Artillery had indeed been building a network of tunnels. According to a report by state-run CCTV, China had more than 3,000 miles of tunnels — roughly the distance between Boston and San Francisco — including deep underground bases that could withstand multiple nuclear attacks.

The news shocked Karber and his team. It confirmed the direction of their research, but it also highlighted how little attention the tunnels were garnering outside East Asia.

The lack of interest, particularly in the U.S. media, demonstrated China’s unique position in the world of nuclear arms.

For decades, the focus has been on the two powers with the largest nuclear stockpiles by far — the United States, with 5,000 warheads available for deployment, and Russia, which has 8,000.

But of the five nuclear weapons states recognized by the Non-Proliferation Treaty, China has been the most secretive. While the United States and Russia are bound by bilateral treaties that require on-site inspections, disclosure of forces and bans on certain missiles, China is not.

The assumption for years has been that the Chinese arsenal is relatively small — anywhere from 80 to 400 warheads.

China has encouraged that perception. As the only one of the five original nuclear states with a no-first-use policy, it insists that it keeps a small stockpile only for “minimum deterrence.”

Given China’s lack of transparency, Karber argues, all the experts have to work with are assumptions, which can often be dead wrong. As an example, Karber often recounts to his students his experience of going to Russia with former defense secretary Frank C. Carlucci to discuss U.S. help in securing the Russian nuclear arsenal.

The United States had offered Russia about 20,000 canisters designed to safeguard warheads — a number based on U.S. estimates at the time.

The generals told Karber they needed 40,000.

Skepticism among analysts

At the end of the tunnel study, Karber cautions that the same could happen with China. Based on the number of tunnels the Second Artillery is digging and its increasing deployment of missiles, he argues, China’s nuclear warheads could number as many as 3,000.

It is an assertion that has provoked heated responses from the arms-control community.

Gregory Kulacki, a China nuclear analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, publicly condemned Karber’s report at a recent lecture in Washington. In an interview afterward, he called the 3,000 figure “ridiculous” and said the study’s methodology — especially its inclusion of posts from Chinese bloggers — was “incompetent and lazy.”

“The fact that they’re building tunnels could actually reinforce the exact opposite point,” he argued. “With more tunnels and a better chance of survivability, they may think they don’t need as many warheads to strike back.”

Reaction from others has been more moderate.

“Their research has value, but it also shows the danger of the Internet,” said Hans M. Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists. Kristensen faulted some of the students’ interpretation of the satellite images.

“One thing his report accomplishes, I think, is it highlights the uncertainty about what China has,” said Mark Stokes, executive director of the Project 2049 Institute, a think tank. “There’s no question China’s been investing in tunnels, and to look at those efforts and pose this question is worthwhile.”

This year, the Defense Department’s annual report on China’s military highlighted for the first time the Second Artillery’s work on new tunnels, partly a result of Karber’s report, according to some Pentagon officials. And in the spring, shortly before a visit to China, some in the office of then-Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates were briefed on the study.

“I think it’s fair to say senior officials here have keyed upon the importance of this work,” said one Pentagon officer who was not authorized to speak on the record.

For Karber, provoking such debate means that he and his small army of undergrads have succeeded.

“I don’t have the slightest idea how many nuclear weapons China really has, but neither does anyone else in the arms-control community,” he said. “That’s the problem with China — no one really knows except them.”

Fascinating work!

Well said– both with respect to “enhanced interrogation” and the action against al-Awlaki.

The Department of Defense has created a new website for information on military commissions. Information can be found on Cases, Facilities/Services, Victim/Witness Assistance, Legal Resources, News/Media Services.

(HT: Bobby Chesney)

Dr. Thomas M. Nichols

Check out The War Room, a new blog by my friend and colleague, Tom Nichols. And in case you were wondering about Tom’s distinguished background . . . from the Naval War College website:

Thomas M. Nichols is a professor of national security affairs in the National Security Decision Making Department, where is also the Course Director for Security, Strategy, and Forces. A former Secretary of the Navy Fellow at the Naval War College, he previously taught international relations and Soviet/Russian affairs at Dartmouth College and Georgetown University. He is a former chairman of the Strategy and Policy Department at the Naval War College, for which he was awarded the Navy Civilian Meritorious Service Medal in 2005. He holds a PhD from Georgetown, an MA from Columbia University, the Certificate of the Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union at Columbia, and a BA from Boston University.

Dr. Nichols was personal staff for defense and security affairs in the United States Senate to the late Sen. John Heinz of Pennsylvania, and was a Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. He has been an Associate of the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University, and he is currently a Senior Associate of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs in New York City and a Fellow of the International History Institute at Boston University. Since 2008, he has been a Fellow in the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where he also teaches courses on “The Future of War” and “Nuclear Weapons and International Security.” He is the author of several books and articles, including The Sacred Cause: Civil-Military Conflict Over Soviet National Security, 1917-1992, The Russian Presidency: Society and Politics in the Second Russian Republic, and Winning the World: Lessons for America’s Future from the Cold War. His most recent book, about the revolutionary changes taking place in the way nations go to war, is Eve of Destruction: The Coming Age of Preventive War (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). At Harvard’s Project on Managing the Atom, he is working on a book tentatively titled No Use: Nuclear Weapons and the Reform of American Security Strategy. He has been a regular commentator for various media, including CNN, the BBC, and local, national, and international publications.

Dr. Nichols is also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy! champion, and appeared in both the 1994 Tournament of Champions and the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions, which featured the top 100 Jeopardy! players from previous years.

Tom Nichols home page at the Kennedy School, including links to recent publications.

Jim O’Donnell
Provost

Chris at New Student Orientation, August 30, 2011

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Christopher C. Joyner Fund at Georgetown University to support the study of International Law. Checks should be made out to “Georgetown University,” with a memo noting “Joyner Memorial” and sent to:

Nancy Barone
Georgetown University Office of Advancement
PO Box 571404
Washington, DC 20057

Chris with his wife, Nancy, and their son Clayton, on the occasion of his winning the Georgetown University Alumni Association Faculty Recognition Award earlier this year.

But 9/11 was also a tragedy in another sense. Without 9/11, there would have been no Guantanamo. There would have been no “enhanced interrogation techniques.” There would have been no waterboarding. There would have been no Bybee Memorandum. And, almost certainly, there would have been no Iraq War– a war that has resulted in the deaths of over 100,000 people at a cost of over 3 trillion dollars. The initial Allied response against al Qaeda and the Taliban in the fall of 2001 made perfect sense. But rather than reinforce the operations in Afghanistan and concentrate on al Qaeda, the United States lost focus and moved to attack Iraq. And in its treatment of detainees, America lost its long-standing adherence to international humanitarian law.

And, thus, at a deeper level, the United States lost its soul.  A country committed to truth, justice, and human rights found itself on the wrong side of all those values. The pre-9/11 innocence– if it ever really existed– can never be regained. But we can reclaim our soul by vowing and acting to become the nation that the better angels of our nature implore us to be.

The New York Times is reporting that the United States and Mexico have been developing “innovative” methods for addressing the challenge of drug cartels. According to the Times,

The United States is expanding its role in Mexico’s bloody fight against drug trafficking organizations, sending new C.I.A. operatives and retired military personnel to the country and considering plans to deploy private security contractors in hopes of  turning around a multibillion-dollar effort that so far has shown few results.

In recent weeks, small numbers of C.I.A. operatives and American civilian military employees have been posted at a Mexican military base, where, for the first time, security officials from both countries work side by side in collecting information about drug cartels and helping plan operations. Officials are also looking into embedding a team of American contractors inside a specially vetted Mexican counternarcotics police unit.

Officials on both sides of the border say the new efforts have been devised to get around Mexican laws that prohibit foreign military and police from operating on its soil, and to prevent advanced American surveillance technology from falling under the control of Mexican security agencies with long histories of corruption.

The Times notes:

American officials declined to provide details about the work being done by the American team of fewer than two dozen Drug Enforcement Administration agents, C.I.A. officials and retired military personnel members from the Pentagon’s Northern Command. For security reasons, they asked The New York Times not to disclose the location of the compound.

But the officials said the compound had been modeled after “fusion intelligence centers” that the United States operates in Iraq and Afghanistan to monitor insurgent groups, and that the United States would strictly play a supporting role.

“The Mexicans are in charge,” said one American military official. “It’s their show. We’re all about technical support.”

While the drug cartels present a serious challenge to both Mexican and American security, is this the best approach? Is this a useful way to deploy retired military personnel? And at a time when we are still attempting to address the damage done by contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, should the United States seriously consider using them in this operation?