Nation Assistance: Does an Exercise in Guatemala by Reserve Components Support United States National Security Strategy?
Abstract : This strategic research paper critically examines the ends-ways-means formulas of United States national security strategy as it relates to performing a nation assistance exercise in Guatemala. It surveys the relevant documents revealing the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff place less value on nation assistance than the President does. Guatemala is an emerging democracy that received nation assistance exercises called Fuertes Caminos in 1993, 1994, and 1995. The author was the aviation commander of Fuertes Caminos 95-North. This paper follows a sequence describing the background of Guatemala and Fuertes Caminos exercises, defining nation assistance policy, then flowing through the United States Army War College (USAWC) strategy formulation guidelines, recommending adjustments and identifying lessons learned.
Military Involvement in Humanitarian Assistance Operations, Is It a Distractor to or, in Our Strategic Interests?
Abstract : The nation cannot undertake a National Security Strategy of 'Engagement and Enlargement' without continued participation in humanitarian assistance operations. This paper will demonstrate how the military's participation is supportive of the National Security Strategy and the historical tradition of military participation.
The uprising of the marginalised: a socio-economic perspective of the Syrian uprising
More than three years after the outbreak of protests in a number of Arab countries, the role of socio-economic factors in these events is attracting more attention. One of the cases that needs more research is Syria. More than three years into the Syrian uprising, the socio-economic roots of the protest movement that became one of the bloodiest civil conflicts in the history of the Middle East need to be examined. While it has been observed that the Syrian uprising, contrary to some ‘Arab Spring’ countries, has been an uprising of more marginalised social groups with a strong role played by poorer segments in the society, particularly rural and rural-to-urban migrants, the socio-economic explanation for this is still underdeveloped. This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of this issue by examining the political and socio-economic compromise that underlined the rule of the Ba’th party in Syria for four decades and unpacking how a combination of internal and external shifts that started in the 1990s and intensified in the 2000s led to the erosion of this compromise, providing the background to the events that began in 2011.