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Improvements to strategic situational awareness (SA)—the ability to characterize the operating environment, detect and respond to threats, and discern actual attacks from false alarms across the spectrum of conflict—have long been assumed to reduce the risk of conflict and help manage crises more successfully when they occur. However, with the development of increasingly capable strategic SA-related technology, growing comingling of conventional and nuclear SA requirements and capabilities, and the increasing risk of conventional conflict between nuclear-armed adversaries, this may no longer be the case. The Project on Nuclear Issues (PONI) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the University of California, Berkeley’s Nuclear Policy Working Group undertook a two-year study to examine the implications of emerging situational awareness technologies for managing crises between nuclear-armed adversaries.
In 2012, a 20-year moratorium on state employment of chemical weapons use was broken. Since then, there have been more than 200 uses, against civilians, military targets, and political enemies. These attacks have broken norms against the use of weapons of mass destruction and create a gap in the nonproliferation fabric—despite the robust international architecture of laws, treaties, agreements, and norms designed to restrain the proliferation and use of these weapons. Accountability for these recent attacks has been limited or nonexistent, which threatens the credibility of the nonproliferation regime and only encourages further use. Leaders must find the political and moral strength to use a full spectrum of tools to reestablish this system of restraint. By understanding the system—built on taboos, norms, deterrence, and a lack of benefits—and corresponding accountability approaches—military, legal, political, diplomatic, economic, and educational—leaders can utilize a menu of potential actions for building more diverse, flexible, scalable, and implementable options to hold accountable users of chemical weapons.
Can contemporary arms control keep pace with the rapid rate of change in both geopolitics and technology? While the challenges to future arms control point to a rocky road ahead, measures that build confidence, reduce miscalculation, enhance transparency, restrain costly and dangerous military competition, and offer useful mechanisms and venues for addressing sources of conflict will be of increasing value. For arms control tools to succeed, however, they must be adapted to the current security environment, account for rapidly evolving technological and informational factors, and consider alternative structures, modalities, and participation models. Indeed, now is the time for a recoupling o...
Technology-enabled influence operations, including disinformation, will likely figure prominently in adversary efforts to impede U.S. crisis response and alliance management in high-risk, high-impact scenarios under a nuclear shadow. Both Russia and China recognize their conventional military disadvantage vis-à-vis conflict with the United States. As a result, both nations use sub-conventional tactics and operations to support their preferred strategies for achieving favorable outcomes while attempting to limit escalation risks. Such strategies include an array of activities loosely identified as influence operations, focused on using and manipulating information in covert, deniable, or obs...
The United States must be prepared to operate in a range of complex environments to meet a range of security challenges and threats, such as humanitarian emergencies, terrorism and violent extremism, great power aggression, health security crises, and international criminal violence. This study focuses on these five functional security imperatives and illustrates each imperative through regionally or subnationally defined operating environments. In each case, the selected security imperative must be addressed in the near term to help meet other U.S. objectives. The goal of the case studies is to characterize the operating environment, identify key tasks and responsibilities to address the security imperative, and develop a set of tools and policy recommendations for operating in those specific environments.
Foreign policy in the post–cold war era is profoundly complex, and so too are the institutions that share the responsibility to guide and manage America's relations with other countries. Policymakers struggle within porous and fragmented institutions, in which policy is driven more powerfully by clusters of like-minded individuals than by disciplined organizations. The nation's political parties face deep divisions over foreign policy and are unable to forge a coherent vision for the future. Congress is increasingly polarized along ideological lines, while traditional internationalist foreign policy spans a truncated political center. Few aspects of U.S. politics are more contentious or co...
The threat of chemical and biological weapons attack against U.S. forces and population centers, as well as those of our allies, is real and growing. Mitigating the effects of such an attack--consequence management--is an essential part of responding to the threat. While progress is being made at the federal level, several departments and agencies, including the Department of Defense (DOD), are struggling to develop and coordinate effective responses. DOD organization, planning, and funding for consequence management fail to reflect the complexity of today's security environment, including: the potential for asymmetric warfare, the vulnerability of military facilities at home and abroad, and...