Center for a New American Security

Here's a fun project for the readership. This should keep you busy through the weekend. I was reading a book chapter by Stathis Kalyvas (.pdf) and came across his definition of civil war, which will be familiar to those of you who have read this book:

I start my week with diffusion on my mind: why do tactics, techniques, procedures and strategies migrate from conflict to conflict and from military organization to military organization? One of the reasons this subject is on my mind is the publication of my friend Michael Horowitz's new book by Princeton University Press.

I am about to board a plane this afternoon that will take me to East Tennessee and a week or so spent with friends and family. I’ll be visiting friends in Memphis and Nashville in addition to doing a little climbing and kayaking. My dissertation, ever-present, will be along for the ride.

I received a note last week from a former USAID administrator lamenting the fact that while the U.S. Department of Defense annual budget remains comfortably north of $700 billion, the U.S. Department of State struggles to keep its measly $58 billion per year. There are a lot of reasons why it's easier to pass a mammoth defense budget than to protect money reserved for foreign aid and diplomatic operations. If U.S.

No one has ever explicitly told me this is part of my job, but I have always thought that one of the more useful things think tanks can do is to mine the world of the social sciences (and academia more broadly) in search of those theories and ideas that -- if proven true -- can and should have a big impact on U.S. policies.

I really need to do some editing today and have spent too much of the workday instead reading two documents. The first is the charge sheet of Capt. Mark Hamilton, USCG, which you can read here and which is totally NSFW (.pdf).

From Lee Smith's The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations:

Much to my amusement, this post on the utlity of quantitative analysis caused quite a stir in the international relations blogosphere. I don't know if folks in security studies just don't have a sense of humor or if it's true what Kissinger said about how university politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

I have written a little about the utility of quantitative analysis in the field of security studies here and here.

A week ago, I spent some time on the blog whining about Quants and their work on counterinsurgency. Since then, two scholars -- distinguished veterans of the war in Iraq -- have told me that while they share some of my frustrations, I should make some exceptions -- especially for the work being done by Jason Lyall, Eli Berman and Jacob Shapiro.