House Armed Services Committee Research Articles

From Helicopters to Hearing Aids

You have accessThe ASHA LeaderIn the Limelight1 Mar 2020From Helicopters to Hearing AidsAn audiologist uses his military experience to support legislation allowing people with hearing loss to serve. Shelley D. Hutchins Shelley D. Hutchins Google Scholar More articles by this author https://doi.org/10.1044/leader.LML.25032020.26 SectionsAboutPDF ToolsAdd to favorites ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In David Alexander knew as a boy he wanted to serve his country. The son of a Marine also wanted to be a pediatrician. In high school, he discovered the Armed Services’ Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program would pay for college. Shortly after starting Loyola University Maryland as pre-med, Alexander realized that path wasn’t for him. “I still wanted to do something related,” he says. “So I literally read through the course catalog and picked communication sciences and disorders (CSD).” Alexander graduated in 2002 as an Army officer headed to helicopter flight training. Although he enjoyed piloting Blackhawks, he couldn’t shake the “medical itch.” In 2009, he met a University of South Dakota audiology professor while giving CSD undergrads his ROTC pitch. The professor encouraged Alexander to complete his audiology degree. Now an audiologist at Virginia Head and Neck Surgeons and serving in the Army Reserves, Alexander applies his piloting skills and experience to his current work. Applying military skills Many skills Alexander used as a pilot enhance his audiology work. Close attention to detail is an obvious overlap. Less so is his willingness to ask others for support. This helped when performing newborn hearing screenings at Maryland School for the Deaf (MSD), where he began in 2015. “Counseling parents was tough, and some parents would get quite emotional,” Alexander says. “I tapped into my ability to ask a more experienced audiologist when I didn’t know how to do something.“ Proving a point Alexander worked with MSD students in a junior cadet program. “We taught leadership training and drill work, which is all about communication,” he says. “In the military this is all verbal command, but we developed hand and arm signs with American Sign Language to do the same marching formations. Our cadets were invited to Fort Jackson in South Carolina to participate in boot camp for a few days. Our students did everything. And they figured out ways to communicate with each other and work together as one big group. The Army mantra happened in front of our eyes— ‘One team, one fight.’” Changing his mind Keith Nolan, a teacher, approached Alexander shortly after he started at MSD. “He is deaf and wanted to join the military,” Alexander says. “He asked what I thought about deaf people serving in the military. I gave a non-answer, but thought to myself it was impossible. But Keith showed me research he’d done on deaf soldiers in the Israeli Defense Force. I then thought—why haven’t we done this already?!” Advocating for change After Keith Nolan convinced Alexander that people who are deaf can serve in the military, the two worked together. “I helped Keith almost pass a bill allowing for a demonstration program of about 20 soldiers who are deaf to serve in the Air Force. It got close last year ... it made it out of the House Armed Services Committee and passed in the House as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), but never made it into the Senate version. It was positive progress, really positive.” Advertising Disclaimer | Advertise With Us Advertising Disclaimer | Advertise With Us Additional Resources FiguresSourcesRelatedDetails Volume 25Issue 2March 2020 Get Permissions Add to your Mendeley library History Published in print: Feb 28, 2020 Metrics Downloaded 483 times Topicsasha-topicsleader_do_tagleader-topicsasha-article-typesCopyright & Permissions© 2020 American Speech-Language-Hearing AssociationLoading ...

Timor-Leste

Timor-Leste Michael Leach (bio) The year 2017 in Timor-Leste was dominated by a round of national elections and a major breakthrough in the country's long-running dispute [End Page 539] with Australia over maritime boundaries. In the latter part of the year, a newly installed fretilin-led minority government proved unable to pass its program in Parliament, which saw the country head back to the polls in May 2018. (fretilin is the acronym for one of Timor-Leste's major political parties: the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor.) A new maritime boundary and revenue-sharing treaty with Australia negotiated over 2017 was signed in early March 2018. The year started unexpectedly with a joint announcement that the government of Timor-Leste would terminate the 2006 Treaty on Certain Maritime Arrangements in the Timor Sea (cmats) with Australia (Australian Treaty Series 2007). The decision, which Australia did not contest, opened the way for progress in boundary negotiations. Aside from sharing the proceeds of undersea resources, the key feature of cmats was a fifty-year moratorium on boundary negotiations in favor of a series of revenue-sharing agreements, known as "provisional arrangements" under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, or unclos. Having vigorously defended cmats as recently as 2016, several factors explain the change in Australia's position. The 2006 treaty had been tarnished by allegations that Australia had spied on the East Timorese negotiating team in 2004 (smh 2013). Timor-Leste had then challenged the treaty, invoking the Vienna Convention's principle that negotiations should take place in "good faith." Equally significantly, in April 2016 the government of Timor-Leste initiated compulsory conciliation proceedings under unclos with the aim of concluding permanent maritime boundaries with Australia. Australia's opening legal gambit—a jurisdictional claim that the cmats treaty had already settled the border dispute—was dismissed by the conciliation commission in September 2016, which found that Australia's obligation to settle the boundary survived the treaty and its purported moratorium (unclos Conciliation Commission 2016). Having lost this argument, Australia had little further practical use for cmats. An additional factor was the dispute between China and its neighbors in the South China Sea, which raised the regional profile of international law in boundary disputes. In that case, Australia urged China to follow the rule of law, as represented by the decision of the tribunal formed under unclos. The contrast with Canberra's own behavior—its refusal to discuss a boundary in the Timor Sea and its withdrawal from the dispute-settlement provisions of unclos shortly before East Timorese independence in 2002—had created a public relations problem for Australia. For example, the powerful US House Armed Services Committee's National Defense Authorization Act for 2018 was specifically amended to encourage resolution of the maritime-boundary dispute between Australia and Timor-Leste. The committee noted that negotiations would send "a positive signal to other states in the region regarding adherence to a rules-based international order," highlighting the "potential security benefits" likely to flow from a peaceful resolution of the dispute (US House Armed Services Committee 2017, 2). There is little question that this shift in Washington [End Page 540] signaled extra pressure on Canberra to resolve the matter within the unclos conciliation process. These negotiations reached a partial conclusion in September 2017, discussed later in this review. The 2017 round of elections occurred in the wake of a government formed in extraordinary circumstances in early 2015, when the former independence movement leader Xanana Gusmão handed over the prime ministership to an opposition fretilin figure, Rui Araújo. Though best seen as a power-sharing executive rather than a formal government of national unity, this informal "grand coalition" between Timor-Leste's two largest parties—the National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction (cnrt) and fretilin—was a remarkable development, given the bitter tensions between the parties as recently as 2012. Described by a senior cnrt minister as a transition from "belligerent democracy to consensus democracy" (Pereira 2014), this powerful combination left President José Maria Vasconcelos (better known by his nom de guerre, Taur Matan Ruak) as the closest thing to an effective opposition. Ruak did...

Capturing the Character of Future War

Abstract: This essay proposes a conceptual framework combining elements of Clausewitz's On War with trend-forecasting techniques to describe future operational environments. This framework captures how the interaction of megatrends--the rate of technological change, the composition of the international system, and the strength of state governance--shapes the character of competition, confrontation, and conflict in each period. We argue this framework can help military officers build the future force. ********** How should military officers describe the future operational environment? In February 25, 2016, testifying before the House Armed Services Committee, US Air Force General and EUCOM Commander, General Philip M. Breedlove referred to a resurgent Russia as an existential threat. (1) Moscow continues to challenge multiple NATO members while investing in a military-modernization program that includes significant increases in autonomous systems. Despite those facts, Russia has a gross domestic product the size of Italy, and it spent less on defense in 2015 than Saudi Arabia. (2) The Islamic State continues to hold terrain in multiple countries, and it has been a magnet for foreign fighters. The group is pressing a 21st-century terror campaign by attacking European cities and waging complex operations in the cyber domain, including the use of social media and hacking the names and addresses of adversaries in an effort to encourage lone-wolf attacks. (3) Yet, the group has lost, by some estimates, as much as 40 percent of its territory in Iraq and Syria, multiple leaders, and as many as 10,000 fighters since 2014. (4) From the Islamic States' use of cyber and traditional guerilla and terror tactics to Russian experiments of combining massive fires with drones and broad-spectrum information warfare in Ukraine, there are signs the future of warfare may already be here. Just as the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the 1973 Arab-Israeli Conflict were harbingers of future conflict, we may be at the juncture where events from Eastern Ukraine to Syria and Iraq signal how warfare is likely to evolve and shape the world of 2030 to 2050. Describing the future character of war should be a central task for the military profession. (5) As bureaucracies, resourcing strategies, and programming processes increase in complexity, often unnecessarily, senior leaders need to make long-term bets on whether to innovate by combining legacy forces with new concepts and incremental improvements or to invent breakthrough capabilities for future contingencies. The future force is built now to be used later. Failing to meet that task abdicates a central responsibility of the military profession. This article introduces an analytical framework for describing the future operational environment based on integrating Clausewitz's concept of the character of war unique to each period with trend analysis techniques common in scenario-planning. (6) We contend macro-trends--specifically, the rate of technological change and through it the available means of coercion, the composition of the international system, and the degree to which political units in that system can secure their internal domains--interact in a trinity-like manner. As these trends interact, they produce an emergent character of war. To describe the future operational environment, military professionals should first define the likely future character of war and use the resulting forecasts to develop new concepts and modernization priorities. The article proceeds by establishing what the character of war is and uses the construct to situate a new approach to describing the future operational environment. From this vantage point, we look at major findings in future studies by the Army and the broader US national security community since the 1970s, highlighting how the interaction of technology, the international system, and governance tends to produce evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary change. …

Capitol Hill Fellowship Gives Resident Insider’s View of Legislative Process

Back to table of contents Previous article ViewpointsFull AccessCapitol Hill Fellowship Gives Resident Insider’s View of Legislative ProcessEllyn Johnson, M.D.Ellyn JohnsonSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:26 Sep 2014https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2014.10a29It’s been a pleasure and a privilege to serve as the 2014 APA Jeanne Spurlock Congressional Fellow the last six months. The fellowship provides psychiatry residents, fellows, and early career psychiatrists an opportunity to work in a congressional office on federal health policy.The fellowship was created in honor of the late Jeanne Spurlock, M.D., who was an APA deputy medical director and head of the Office of Minority and National Affairs, as well as a staunch advocate for children and minorities. My fellowship experience gave me the opportunity to serve on the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) Subcommittee on Personnel. The fellowship started with lots of background reading on the current reorganization of the military health system, which culminated in a hearing on this topic. I wrote the educational background material for the committee members, the opening remarks of the subcommittee chair, and many of the questions posed to the witnesses. I served as the subject-matter expert during meetings with medical special-interest groups pursuing a relationship with the Department of Defense (DoD) or seeking TRICARE coverage of specific therapeutic modalities. I was surprised at how often I was called on to review the evidence base of therapeutic modalities that had grabbed the attention of members of Congress. This showed me the importance of a well-organized political action strategy to get your issues taken seriously by elected officials. Although my recommendations weren’t always accepted, lawmakers appreciated the presence of a neutral physician able to translate the medical literature into lay terms, especially in the area of mental health treatment. In light of the committee’s oversight function, we had many briefings with DoD and the military services’ leaders around their efforts on suicide prevention, improvment of the Armed Forces’ mental health overall, sexual-assault response and prevention, the opening of combat positions to women, and more efficient collaboration with the Veterans Administration, among other topics. Each fiscal year, the HASC is responsible for passing the National Defense Authorization Act, which sets DoD policy as a companion to the annual appropriations bill that releases funding for defense spending. As the bill cycle heated up, I focused on reviewing and giving recommendations on proposed health care legislative provisions, many of which focused on military mental health. I received a priceless education in diplomacy as I discussed my concerns and recommendations with House members’ staffs and sought compromises that stayed as true as possible to the medical literature in the setting of complex political considerations. My time on the HASC really challenged my clinical and research interpretation skills in ways I did not expect. I also wrote many health-related parts of the bill, including spotlighting the forward-thinking suicide and resilience research that the Army is currently conducting. The bill recently passed the House.The mentoring and guidance I received during my fellowship was unmatched. Working under the direction of committee staff, I fully participated in all subcommittee activities and was accepted as a member of the team.Congressional staff are far more accessible and interested in their constituents then they receive credit for. We had meetings and gave professional recommendations regardless of political affiliation or personal views. My eyes were opened to how powerful special-interest lobbies can be, not from the backroom deals seen on television, but by organized grassroots efforts energized by a common issue. There is no excuse for psychiatrists, and all mental health care providers, to be politically inactive on the local, state, and national levels. Lawmakers need mental health care experts to inform policymaking, and our patients need political advocates. I challenge you to become politically active through APA, your district branch, and the APA Political Action Committee (APAPAC). I want to give special thanks to the staff in the Department of Government Relations and my subcommittee staff leader for her generous mentorship and teaching. ■Ellyn Johnson, M.D., was a resident at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University when she began her fellowship and is now on active duty in the U.S. Air Force. ISSUES NewArchived

Leaning In: Actions Taken by Congresswomen of the 113th Congress to Address Military Sexual Assault

On May 6, 2013 the Department of Defense released its Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military. According to this report, the number of sexual assaults reported by members of the military in fiscal year 2012 rose six percent, from 3,183 to 3,374. An anonymous survey included in the report detailed that “…the number of service members who had experienced unwanted sexual contact could be as many as 26,000, but most never reported the incidents. That number is an increase over the 19,000 estimated assaults in 2011.” This report followed the March 2013 incident of an Air Force lieutenant general overturning the court martial sexual assault conviction of a lieutenant colonel fighter pilot, and was quickly succeeded by the June 2013 incident of an Army major general who was suspended for failing to report or investigate an allegation of sexual assault. Additionally, a major embarrassment for the Air Force was the arrest of their Chief of the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Program for sexual assault of a civilian woman, also in June. These reports, all coming on the heels of the 2012 documentary The Invisible War and years of Department of Defense senior leader testimony about new programs emplaced and progress made, created an immediate political reaction. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel briefed the press on May 7th stating, “This department may be nearing a stage where the frequency of this crime and the perception that there is tolerance of it could very well undermine our ability to effectively carry out the mission ...That is unacceptable to me and the leaders of this institution.” He announced a new series of steps to improve sexual assault prevention efforts and directed the service chiefs to hold “all military commanders accountable for establishing command climates of dignity and respect.” President Obama met with senior military leaders on May 16th and not only called the issue “shameful and disgraceful,” but stated that it made the military less effective, which is “dangerous to our national security.” While Secretary Hagel attempted to control the damage, numerous members of the 113th Congress decided that they needed to get involved. This Congress is unique in that it has a record number of 102 women – 82 in the House and 20 in the Senate. It also has a record-high, seven female members on the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) and eleven on the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), making them a “formidable, aggressive force in questioning military brass and shaping legislation.” This confluence of high profile military sexual assault cases and the record number of both total Congresswomen and those on the Armed Services Committees in the 113th Congress directly contributed to the passage of strong legislation in January 2014 to better protect uniformed victims of sexual assault.

Reassessing the All-Volunteer Force

When America ended the military draft in 1973 and transitioned to the All-Volunteer Force (AVF), the success of this ambitious enterprise was not guaranteed. Yet by the early 1990s, decisive victor...

The Risks of Ignoring Strategic Insolvency

A moment has arrived when a great power with global responsibilities is having a crisis of confidence. Its economy has grown sluggish and it is being overtaken by a number of rising competitors. Financial pressures loom, notably the ability to keep a balance between government revenues and expenses. It is losing long-standing superioritiespsychological as well as technological and numericalin key categories of military power; this great power, whose diplomats and military leaders manage active or potential conflicts from Afghanistan to Europe with treaty alliances as far flung as Japan and Australia, confronts the need for constraints on its global ambitions and posture. This urgent reckoning has been prompted in part by a painful and largely unnecessary counterinsurgency war far from home that cost many times more than initially thought and exhausted the country's overstretched land forces.

The Death of Military Justice

Buried within the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2011 was a provision offered by Mr. Patrick Murphy of Pennsylvania to repeal Section 654 of Title 10 US Code, the so-called Ask, Don't Tell Policy. (1) Advocates and the American media see the repeal as a minor matter limited to admitting open homosexuals to military service. On December 19, 2010, the Senate voted to end the Ask, Don't Tell Policy. This is precedent setting in that neither the House of Representatives nor the Senate held hearings to assess the impact of Section 654's rescindment in its entirety. Unfortunately, despite its title, Policy Concerning Homosexuality in the Armed Forces, the section contains important military policy that extends well beyond the narrow issue of homosexual eligibility for military service. The repeal of those provisions will radically change the American system of military justice and discipline. Congress failed to wait on the Department of Defense's report regarding the repeal of Section 654. Thus, the report will have no power to mitigate the effects, because to restore or retain portions of Section 654 is to argue against the repeal and reveal that its repeal is improvident. With the repeal, the US military services will enter a litigious period of indiscipline. To understand why repealing Section 654 will radically alter the system of military justice and discipline, it is first necessary to examine the Section 654 findings. The findings were not only drawn from the testimony presented in the hearings before the House Armed Services Committee in 1993 but also from appellate and Supreme Court rulings on matters of military law. Congress appended the findings to ensure that the policy enacted in 1993 would withstand constitutional challenge and based the findings on Congress's exclusive constitutional power to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces. Repealing those findings will mean that military courts will no longer be able to rely on those legal precedents as guides for the governance of the armed forces. Because those findings describe the principles that have governed the order and discipline of the military since the US civil war, the meaning of good order will be erased. That is why those findings need to be carefully reviewed. There are fifteen findings listed in Section 654, among which only two, 13 and 15, directly refer to the issue of homosexuality. Finding 12 refers to living conditions during deployments and can be reasonably connected to 13 and 15. Two findings, 1 and 3, merely restate the power granted to Congress in Article I, Section 8, Clause 14 to regulate the armed forces. The repeal will have no effect on those powers. Five findings discuss in general terms military service. Finding 4 states the primary purpose of the armed forces; Finding 5 recognizes the need for personal sacrifice; the need for good order and discipline is recalled in Finding 6; and Finding 7 cites the importance of cohesion to military effectiveness. The remaining six findings, 2, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 14, are key, because they define the principles that underlie the established system of military justice and order. Absent these principles, most, if not all, policy regarding selection, retention, and discipline are subject to legal challenge or reinterpretation. (2) The significance of the six key findings cannot be overstated. They have been the subject of various military policy debates throughout the history of the United States. (3) Consequently, these six findings represent a clear contemporary exercise of congressional authority and a clear definition of the military order the Congress intends. First among them is Finding 8, which has two parts. Finding 8 states that military life is fundamentally different from civilian life; the military exists as a specialized society, and one that has not only its own rules but also restrictions on personal behavior that would be intolerable in civilian society. …

Managing the Global Commons

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. National Security Council, “NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,” April 14, 1950, http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-68.htm. 2. U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), “Quadrennial Defense Review,” February 2010, p. 8, http://www.defense.gov/QDR/images/QDR_as_of_12Feb10_1000.pdf. 3. See International Maritime Organization, “International Shipping: Carrier of World Trade,” 2005, http://www.imo.org/includes/blastDataOnly.asp/data_id%3D18900/IntShippingFlyerfinal.pdf. 4. See Air Transport Action Group, “The Economic & Social Benefits of Air Transport,” 2008, pp. 2–9, http://www.icao.int/ATWorkshop/ATAG_SocialBenefitsAirTransport.pdf. 5. Joseph Nye, “Recovering American Leadership,” Survival 50, no. 1 (February 2008): 63. This study is also informed by A.T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1987); Barry Posen, “Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of U.S. Hegemony,” International Security 28, no. 1 (Summer 2003): 5–46; Michele Flournoy and Shawn Brimley, “The Contested Commons,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 135, No. 7 (July 2009), http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/story.asp?STORY_ID=1950. 6. See National Intelligence Council, “Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World,” November 2008, http://www.dni.gov/nic/PDF_2025/2025_Global_Trends_Final_Report.pdf. 7. See DOD, “Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People's Republic of China,” 2009, http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/pdfs/China_Military_Power_Report_2009.pdf. 8. For an excellent summary of the rise of states with anti-access capabilities, see Andrew F. Krepinevich, “Why AirSea Battle?” February 2010, http://www.csbaonline.org/4Publications/PubLibrary/R.20100219.Why_AirSea_Battle/R.20100219.Why_AirSea_Battle.pdf. 9. See Fariborz Haghshenass, “Iran's Asymmetric Naval Warfare,” Policy Focus, no. 87, September 2008, http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/pubPDFs/PolicyFocus87.pdf; Nasser Karimi and Lee Keath, “Iran Begins War Games in Persian Gulf Oil Route,” Associated Press, April 22, 2010, http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100422/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iran_war_games; Caitlin Talmadge, “Closing Time: Assessing the Iranian Threat to the Strait of Hormuz,” International Security 33, no. 1 (Summer 2008): 82–117; U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, “Iran's Naval Forces: From Guerilla Warfare to a Modern Naval Strategy,” Fall 2009, http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/oni/iran-navy.pdf. 10. Siobhan Gorman, Yochi Dreazen, and August Cole, “Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones,” Wall Street Journal, December 17, 2009, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126102247889095011.html. 11. Quadrennial Defense Review, p. xiv. 12. Quadrennial Defense Review, p. 9. 13. Quadrennial Defense Review, p. iii and Michele Flournoy and Shawn Brimley, “The Contested Commons.” 14. Quadrennial Defense Review, p. vi. 15. Quadrennial Defense Review, p. 32. 16. Quadrennial Defense Review, pp. 32–33. 17. Quadrennial Defense Review, p. 33. 18. John T. Bennett, “Flournoy Defends QDR, Budget Focus on ‘High-End’ Ops,” FederalTimes.com, February 3, 2010, http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20100203/DEPARTMENTS01/2030303/0/TWITTER. 19. Michael Schumann, “How to Defeat Pirates: Success in the Strait,” Time, April 22, 2009, http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1893032,00.html. 20. See Pew Charitable Trust, “Ratify Law of the Sea: U.S. National Security,” n.d., http://ratifylawofthesea.org/?page_id=17 and “Transcript of Hillary Clinton's Confirmation Hearing,” Council on Foreign Relations Essential Documents, January 13, 2009, http://www.cfr.org/publication/18225/transcript_of_hillary_clintons_confirmation_hearing.html. 21. See Timon Singh, “Space: The Final Junkyard,” EU Infrastructure, August 24, 2008, http://www.euinfrastructure.com/news/Space-The-Final-Junkyard/. 22. See Timon Singh, “Space: The Final Junkyard,” EU Infrastructure, August 24, 2008, http://www.euinfrastructure.com/news/Space-The-Final-Junkyard/. 23. See Robert D. Kaplan, “The Geography of Chinese Power,” Foreign Affairs 89, no. 3 (May/June 2010): 39–40. 24. Quadrennial Defense Review, pp. 14–15. 25. Quadrennial Defense Review, pp. 34–35. 26. Remarks by Rep. Michael Turner (R-OH), “Hearing of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee on the Status of United States Strategic Forces,” March 16, 2010. 27. Remarks by Rep. Michael Turner (R-OH), “Hearing of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee on the Status of United States Strategic Forces,” March 16, 2010, pp. 37–39. 28. DOD, “Bloggers Roundtable with Michael Nacht, Assitant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs, and Kathleen Hicks, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense,” February 3, 2010, http://www.dodlive.mil/files/2010/02/0203qdr-Nacht-and-Hicks.pdf. Additional informationNotes on contributorsAbraham M. DenmarkAbraham M. Denmark is a fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). He is the coeditor and coauthor of “Contested Commons: The Future of American Power in a Multipolar World” (CNAS, January 2010). He can be followed on twitter: @AbeDenmark

PASTORAL CARE IN A NEW PUBLIC: LESSONS LEARNED IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE

This is how I started my testimony to the Subcommittee on Military Personnel of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee in June 2005. I was asked to testify as an author of a report reflecting the work that I did from 2003-2005 as a pastoral care consultant at the United States Air Force Academy. Along with a general who headed the Pentagon's investigation of the Academy and a retired Navy chaplain who oversaw the credentialing of military chaplains, my testimony became part of the investigation by Congress to explore allegations of religious intolerance and Christian proselytizing at the United States Air Force Academy. This work in progress stems from my time at the Academy, the subsequent public responses to that engagement, and my own questions about moving pastoral theology and care into this or any public arena.

CHEMICAL ARMS REKINDLE DEBATE

REPUBLICANS ON CAPITOL Hill are citing a classified Army intelligence report as evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and, therefore, that the U.S. was justified in invading Iraq in 2003. The Army's National Ground Intelligence Center reported in April that since the 2003 invasion, coalition forces have found about 500 pre-1991 rockets and artillery shells containing degraded mustard agent and sarin nerve agent. On June 21, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Sen. Rick Santorum (R.-Pa.) went public with this finding. Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on Hoekstra's committee, said the April study contained nothing new. In fact, the Iraq Survey Group's 2004 report concluded that Iraq had no significant stocks of WMD at the time of the invasion. Still, the issue of Hussein's WMD surfaced again at a June 29 hearing of the House Armed Services Committee. Panel Chairman Duncan Hunter ...

Requiem for Public Diplomacy?

In the mid-1960s at the height of an unpopular war permeated by unprecedented levels of global anti-Americanism, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee called for the termination of one of the country's most ambitious enterprises of public diplomacy. Enraged by the tidal wave of resentment sweeping through Europe, Congressman L. Mendel Rivers called for the dismantling of American war cemeteries in France and the repatriation of the sixty thousand bodies of those who had sacrificed their "lives to save that nation from disgraceful defeat."1 Built in the aftermath of two world wars, American military cemeteries on foreign soil were quintessential, if somewhat macabre, manifestations of public diplomacy. In many ways, these vast cities of the dead ensconced the promise and limitations of this much-touted strategy to promote national ambitions by circumventing traditional diplomatic channels and appealing directly to the proverbial "people." This quest for an unmediated dialogue with the people of Europe by means of the cemeteries was ensnared by a set of familiar issues. To begin with, prospective audiences ignored, reinterpreted, and subverted the intent of the plan's architects. In Europe of the 1960s, a critical public interpreted these signs of American commitment to the Western cause as self-absorbed; they evoked resentment rather than empathy. Given the context of the time, the sprawling necropoli were dismissed as megalomaniac and intrusive. Their sheer size, not to mention the very decision to permanently inter American remains on foreign soil, projected American imperialism rather than altruism. The iconographic elements of these sites were, as well, heavy-handed to the point of inscrutability. Created by joint government-private ventures, the cemeteries were pastiches of classical motifs and indecipherable modernism. Their architecture and art were derisive mixed metaphors, a quilt of catchy symbols and ponderous missives. The disappointing response to this crowning project of public diplomacy—ranging from the ambivalent to the hostile—suggested that the master strategy for an unmediated engaging of domestic audiences had failed to foster the [End Page 345] type of understanding of American goals that its underwriters had expected. To his credit, Congressmen Rivers understood that failure had little to do with the project itself. The cemeteries were unpersuasive because of the political context of the time. Public diplomacy could not function in a hostile political climate, in which the deeds and values of the United States were rampantly unpopular. When juxtaposed with discontents over the resonance and effectiveness of contemporary public diplomacy, the cemetery controversy appears strikingly familiar. Kennedy and Lucas survey a plethora of familiar frustrations concerning the inability to sell a wary world a product with very limited appeal. The supersized projects of present-day public diplomacy elicit disappointment, borne out of an unwillingness of the Beltway-Madison Avenue complex to acknowledge the limitations of advertising strategies in a hostile political climate. Of course, not all of the discontents of contemporary public diplomacy are repeat performances. Kennedy and Lucas identify several compelling problems and issues directly related to recent cultural, political, and social developments. In the limited space I have at my disposal, I shall comment on two contemporary caveats—technical and epistemological—and their detrimental effect on latter-day public diplomacy. My comments are born out of an uncertainty as to the fate of public diplomacy and the appropriate tools for analyzing this enterprise. I am unsure whether we should be performing an autopsy, in which the methodological tools of historical inquiry appear most appropriate, or whether the occasional twinge and spasm suggest vital signs worthy of a broader cultural analysis. To clarify the present status of public diplomacy, I offer my understanding of Kennedy and Lucas's analysis of the inherent tension between public diplomacy's cold war paradigms and the waning resonance of the nation-state. The challenges of nonstatist entities and the heteropolarization of the global arena, they suggest, pose insurmountable obstacles for a mechanism born and bred in the cold war. Public diplomacy is ill-prepared for the transition from a binary arena of...

Revisiting History and Forgotten Balkans Issues

Lucien N. Nedzi was a member of the House of Representatives from 1961 to 1981. A Democrat from Michigan, he served as a member of the House Armed Services Committee and as chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence,among other assignments. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board ofMediterranean Quarterly.

Geopolitical change and congressional committee governance: The Case of the US House armed services committee

This article examines the Armed Services Committee of the United States Houses of Representatives (HASC) at the beginning of the post‐cold war era. Utilising Fenno's 1973 framework, the article traces HASC's evolution through three periods: the ‘textbook’ period (1947–70); the transition period (1970–89); and the post‐cold war period (since 1989). It explores how changing environmental constraints and member goals have shaped its strategic premises, in Fenno's terms. Reporting on recent trends at HASC, I consider whether, in the post‐cold war era, HASC may be said to operate on the basis of any strategic premises at all. The article concludes by considering two key questions about Fenno's framework. Is it time bound? And, can it explain change?

Nuclear warhead safety and the CTB

D uring 1990, with the end of the Cold War, nuclear-warhead safety became the US nuclear-weapon design laboratories' leading argument against a comprehensive test ban (CTB). This shift marks the third-and hopefully final-stage in this debate. From about 1961 to 1978, the principal argument against a CTB was based on the theoretical possibility that, by decoupling low-yield nuclear explosions in huge underground caverns, the USSR might be able to reduce their seismic signals to a level where they would be difficult to distinguish from background events.! Enough uncertainty was created about the verifiability of a CTB to result in the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty not banning underground testing. In 1978, after the Carter Administration-determined to overcome the verification problem with an apparently cooperative Soviet Union-had resumed negotiations on a CTB, the problem of maintaining warhead reliability without testing became the main argument against a test ban.2 There were a number of rebuttals by former weapon designers-the most detailed being in a 1987 report requested by the chairmen of the US House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees and other members of Congress from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory weapon physicist, Ray Kidder.3 However, progress toward a CTB was held up for another decade. In the spring of 1990, the warhead safety issue surfaced in public as a result of recommendations from the US nuclear-weapon laboratories that the SRAM-A short-range attack missile not be loaded onto bombers on runway alert and that urgent safety-related modifications be made in nuclearartillery shells deployed in Europe.4 In response, the House Armed Services Committee established its own expert advisory panel made up of three senior --- physicists: Sidney D. Drell of Stanford, a long-time high-level government adviser on technical and national security issues; John S. Foster Jr, a former director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; and Charles H. Townes of the University of California, Berkeley, and another long-time highlevel government adviser on strategic weapon policy as recently as the

THE ADMIRALS' REVOLT OF 1949: LESSONS FOR TODAY

Abstract : The supercarrier/B-36 controversy of 1949 was ostensibly a struggle between the Navy and the Air Force over funding priorities. At the controversy's most basic level, the two services disagreed over the division of the defense budget. The Navy wanted the largest share of the defense dollar in order to build more aircraft carriers, specifically supercarriers, capable of launching large multi-engine aircraft. The Air Force, in turn, argued that it should receive the largest slice of the defense pie to expand to 70 combat groups. In the struggle that followed, Defense Secretary Louis Johnson seemingly sided with the Air Force and ordered the cancellation of the Navy's new supercarrier. In the aftermath of the cancellation, a number of rumors circulated that cast considerable aspersions on the characters of Johnson, Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington, and Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg. These rumors alleged corruption in the procurement contract with Consolidated-Vultee Aircraft Corporation for its new bomber, the B-36. Carl Vinson, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, scheduled hearings to examine the matter. Those hearings, held in August 1949, proved conclusively that corruption was not involved in the B-36 contract, and the issue thus appeared to be settled. But the Navy insisted upon further hearings to examine the broader issues of national defense strategy and the conduct of a future war. This article examines the war planning and budgetary constraints that culminated in the revolt. The incident also implies wider questions of professionalism and civilian control of the military. Although the supercarrier/B-36 controversy has been written about before, it has been addressed in considerably shaded hindsight: the Navy's mission was transformed; therefore, the seamen must have been right. This article, based largely on primary sources hitherto unused, will examine the Navy's methods and the implications of those methods.

Defense Training Technology Applications

The Joint Service Research and Development program promotes the application of technology to solve manpower, personnel, and training (MPT) problems common to the military Services. The program originated in the 1978 House Armed Services Committee (HASC) hearings on military MPT issues, and subsequent HASC requests for tri-service coordination and funding of Defense-wide efforts. It is administered through a Joint Service Research and Development Steering Committee, which has representatives of each Service. Since funding for the program is in the engineering development category, it is essential that products be demonstrated and evaluated within a short time, usually three years. The products represent a culmination of successful laboratory research and development. The panel describes five of the products. TRAID consists of a library of computer-based instructional programs which is sufficiently flexible to support development, delivery, and management to meet most Service instructional requirements. Each of the Service training laboratories participate, to synthesize work related to computer-based instruction across are those which have been successfully demonstrated within the developing Service. Language Skills Computer Assisted Instruction, developed by the Navy Personnel Research and Development Center (NPRDC), automates literacy instruction It applies a diagnostic-prescriptive approach to remedial reading, using material from Navy manuals. The Computerized Hand-held Instructional Prototype, CHIP, is a revision of the Army Research Institute's (ARI) tutor device CHIP combines the miniaturization advances in semiconductor technology with the advantages of computer-based instruction, providing adaptive training, controlled feedback, self-pacing, and effective drill and practice in non-traditional settings. The Personal Electronic Aid for Maintenance (PEAM) is a joint venture of the Naval Training Equipment Center and ARI. PEAM improves the productivity of the organizational level maintenance technician by enhancing the quality, management, and delivery of technical information through an automated maintenance information system. Interactive Videodisc Instruction for Basic Skills Training, supported by 14 video-discs, is an ARI program. The training covers spatial orientation and navigational skills, study and test-taking skills, problem solving, and other learning strategies. Instruction is presented in the context of the Army Skill Qualification Test, Expert Infantryman's Badge, and tactical exercises. Additional land navigation materials are under development for the commander of the MI Abrams tank. Demonstrations of the technologies, following the presentations, allow the audience to sample these Joint Service program products.

Information Exchange in Congress: The Case of the House Armed Services Committee

Information Exchange in Congress: The Case of the House Armed Services Committee

A military medical school.

One day last fall, when the House of Representatives passed HR2 authorizing the Department of Defense to establish and operate medical school, the reaction was certainly restrained. If the corresponding Senate bill is passed and the legislative intent materializes, the traditional relationship between medicine and the military, and between higher education and the federal government, will have been drastically changed. The recruitment of physicians by the military has always been difficult as indicated by the peristence of the doctor draft. Now, with national commitment to an all-volunteer military force, and history of limited interest by physicians in military service beyond the draft, there is concern for the future adequacy of medical care available to members of the military forces. Introduced by F. Edward Hebert (D-La), the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, HR 2, a bill to establish Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences,

World Events

Why is the United States fighting a cold war against China and a hot war in South Vietnam? Secretary McNamara told the House Armed Services Committee on February 18, 1965 that it was "to halt Communist expansion in Asia." Asia is presently about half socialist. Siberia, People's China, North Korea, North Vietnam, and Mongolia, with a total population of about 800 million, are busy with socialist construction. In addition, leaders in India, Indonesia, Burma, and Ceylon, with a population of more than 600 million, have declared their intention of working toward socialism.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.