ALLIES Hosts Second Annual Intellectual Roundtable on Increasing National Participation in Security and Defense

NEXUS | The IGL Newsletter | Fall 2008

"The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards."
Sir William Francis Butler

The 2008 Intellectual Roundtable “Civilians and Soldiers: Increasing National Participation in Security and Defense” explored the increasing need to combine intellectual and technical competencies that have, until now, largely been relegated into separate civilian or military spheres. The dilemmas of the 21st century— resource scarcity, climate change, terrorism, religious fanaticism—require both civilians and soldiers to work together to create a national security apparatus capable of combining both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ tools of power. Only through a more expansive policy approach that draws on a wide variety of disciplines and knowledge, will the US create coherent solutions to complex global problems. The 2008 Intellectual Roundtable addressed how to involve a more diverse set of actors in national security by engaging with future leaders in the formative stages of their education, giving them a head start and an adequate base of knowledge for addressing the foremost issues of this century.

Since Spring 2006, the objective of the Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services (ALLIES) has been to create innovative programming designed to improve civil-military relations at the undergraduate level. Its projects, which range from on-campus speaking events to sending joint delegations of civilian and military students to conduct international research, are aimed at building a bridge for shared understanding between future leaders in the United States and the world.

The ALLIES Roundtable brought together practitioners from the military, civilian government, civil society, and private sector with the academic community—from professors to civilian and military students. Together, through the use of guided, small-group discussions in conjunction with panel presentations, these disparate groups came together to discuss issues such as “Increasing Participation in National Security”, “Obstacles to Civil Military Cooperation”, “The Meaning of Citizenship”, and “ALLIES, The Way Forward”. The public events featured keynote addresses by Professor Antonia Chayes of Tuft’s Fletcher School and Professor Andrew Bacevich of Boston University, as well as panel discussions on “Strange Bedfellows? The Department of Defense and the Social Sciences” and “The Imminent Challenge: Transitioning Security in Fragile States” and the screening of the award-winning documentary “Hidden Wounds”.

Antonia Chayes is Visiting Professor of International Politics and Law at The Fletcher School. She chairs the Project on International Institutions and Conflict Management at the Program on Negotiation at the Harvard Law School. During the Carter Administration she was Assistant and later, Under Secretary of the US Air Force, where she was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. She has served on several Federal Commissions, including the Vice President’s White House Aviation Safety and Security Commission, and the Commission on Roles and Missions of the United States Armed Forces. In 2004, she received the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award.

Andrew J. Bacevich is Professor of International Relations and History at Boston University. A graduate of the U. S. Military Academy, he is the author of The Limits of Power: American Exceptionalism, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U. S. Diplomacy, and The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War.

The panel discussion on the Department of Defense and the Social Sciences examined the growing emphasis within the DOD on drawing from the social sciences to bolster US security aims. In recent years, the Department of Defense has begun to reach out to the social sciences, requesting various disciplines' participation in national security, from seeking social science research through Project Minerva, to utilizing academics in the writing of the new counterinsurgency manual, to the use of anthropologists and other social scientists in the field on Human Terrain Teams. It explored the potential ethical dilemmas of such a relationship, as well as current barriers to cooperation and ways to overcome some of those barriers. Panelists included Dr. Donald Abenheim, Academic Associate for Strategic Studies and an Associate Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School; Major Tania Chacho, United States Military Academy; Dr. Paul Joseph, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Department at Tufts University; and Major John Powell Williams (Ret.), Lecturer in the Leadership, Ethics and Law Department at the U.S. Naval Academy

The panel discussion on security sector reform examined obstacles to cooperation, current efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and possible solutions to the problem of achieving the whole-of-government approach necessary for reform. A necessary precondition for state-building is basic security. In failed or failing states, that security can often only be achieved be comprehensive security reform at all levels, including the armed forces, the police forces and the judicial system, the entities that oversee these organizations, and the legislative and executive institutions that sit at the top of government. Effective security sector reform requires a coherent whole-of-government approach that involves multiple US agencies, civilian and military. It is arguable whether there are structures in place to allow for adequate communication and coordination among the various agency actors. Panelists included Mr. Dave Davis, a retired member of the Army Corps of Engineers from the Center for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence at George Mason University's School of Information and Technology Engineering; Dr. Karen Guttieri, a stability operations and civil affairs specialist at the Cebrowski Institute for Innovation at the Naval Postgraduate School; Dr. Richard Hoffman, Director of the Center for Civil-Military Relations (CCMR) at the US Naval Post Graduate School; and Mr. Jake Sherman (EPIIC’96, A’96), Project Coordinator for the Building International Capacity for Security Sector Reform project at New York University’s Center for International Cooperation.

“Hidden Wounds” explores the painful reality of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), through the stories of three veterans and their struggles to overcome the trauma of their experiences. The Documentary received the National Edward R. Murrow Award and the New England Emmy. Directed by Iris Adler, Executive Editor for New England Cable News, the documentary has won the Cine Golden Eagle Award and the Silver Remi Award and it has been shown at the 2007 United Nations Association Film Festival, among many others.

As an ALLIES annual capstone event, the annual Roundtable seeks to identify the most promising avenues for engaging undergraduates in the civil-military dialogue and leveraging the resources of universities and colleges to help bridge the civil-military gap in a national and global context.