U.S. MILITARY BROKEN, SAYS WHO?
Ben Andruss

With the U.S. military engaged in two countries, senior military officers have been forced to re-write the playbook by restructuring military units and deployments to maintain an appropriate force level. Military analysts, educated but un-experienced in waging war, claim the U.S. military is “broken” without ever defining the term. Various news outlets employ retired military officers to parry with analysts, while enlisted service members, who serve on the front lines, have their voices minimized in the debate.

Military analysts live in think tanks and policy advocacy centers. For example, the Center for American Progress employs 19 people as national security/military senior staff and fellows of which ZERO were enlisted and only THREE have military experience. Indeed, as Paul Rieckhoff, Executive Director and Founder of Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America has noted, “Participating in a heavily secured, carefully orchestrated sight-seeing visit to Iraq does not make you a military expert any more than a trip to Yankee stadium qualifies one to be a baseball broadcaster for ESPN.” With education the primary qualification for employment, highlighting the sources of information and confessing to reliance on second hand knowledge should be a requisite for the working papers produced by these centers. Moreover, while analysts are certainly qualified to speak on policy, assessment on the state of the U.S. military is not a policy issue. Gays in the military, education requirements for enlisted soldiers, and the raising of the maximum age for new recruits are policy issues, and even those require first-hand knowledge of military culture to fully comprehend.

As YPFP continues to grow, YPFP is seeking volunteers to help manage, organize, and execute a wide range of Programming activity in both leadership roles and as part of our Events Staff.  Working with the Programming Staff gives you the opportunity to interact with foreign policy organizations, talk with senior foreign policy leaders gain valuable leadership and management experience, and work with a wide ranging, dynamic team of young professionals from Washington, New York, and London.

The specific positions are listed below.  For more information on each position and how to apply, please click on the links below.  Please note that all are located in Washington, DC.

• Executive Director for Programming
• Associate Director for Programming Management
• Associate Director for Partnerships
• Director for the Annual Conference
• Deputy Director for Discussion Groups
• Events Staff

Several months ago, Young Professionals in Foreign Policy began its Discussion Group Series to provide members with the opportunity to discuss current events, share resources, and exchange views with fellow YPFP members in a small group setting. Discussion groups have since become one of YPFP’s most popular and successful programs. Due to the high demand, we are pleased to announce the launch of four new discussion groups:

• Defense Policy
• East Asia
• Energy and the Environment
• Gender in Foreign Policy

In addition, we will be accepting applications to our six existing discussion groups:

• Africa
• Development Policy
• Latin America
• Middle East
• Russia & Eurasia
• Western Europe 

Please read on for further details about the Discussion Group series, applications, discussion group descriptions, and contact information.

Dear Colleagues,

Young Professionals in Foreign Policy is seeking applications for several volunteer positions to serve on the YPFP leadership team. In the last two years, YPFP has grown into a dynamic organization with close to 1,000 members; weekly meetings with influential foreign policy leaders and experts; a website with a blog and useful resources for jobs, events, and articles by members; a vibrant branch in London; and a rapidly growing public service program. This exciting progress has only been possible because of the talented and dedicated volunteers in YPFP's leadership.

Discussion Groups

To give YPFP members the opportunity to exchange ideas in a small group setting, YPFP is launching a series of Discussion Groups. These groups aim to bring together YPFP members within various fields of foreign policy, providing them with a forum to exchange views, discuss current events, share resources and opportunities, present and receive feedback on their writing and current work, and expand their conversations beyond YPFP's regular events. In addition to providing another venue for discussion, we also hope these groups will strengthen the YPFP community by fostering personal as well as professional relationships.

This July, YPFP will launch the first six Discussion Groups focusing on thematic or regional areas:

From the earliest days after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the explosion of violence in so-called failed states, the American military and civilian government organizations have been forced together in a marriage of necessity. They each have specialties; they each work in their own box, sometimes having no idea what the other is doing; and they do not always talk with each other. This “shotgun�? National Security Policy is as ineffective as it is unwieldy. Perhaps even more damningly, to continue with the analogy, the wielder of that shotgun, the US National Security Apparatus, has not yet clearly defined the strategic vision that should define this marriage.

YPFP Abroad

"An African portrait: Chad"

 Editor's Note: This is the first in a series of essays by YPFP members about their travels, work and studies abroad. This member spent several months in Chad. YPFP does not publish content anonymously; however, we made an exception in this case to protect the author.

Watching the dust rise from the ambient cacophony on the dirt roads as the sun undergoes its daily colorful mutation, I can barely make sense of Chad. People walking around, slowly pacing every step, the horde of people is now starting to disperse, on their way to the local mosque. The poverty is more than tangible: it can be felt at every street corner, among the young children who run after Westerners to sell them peanuts, or by the patent lack of hygiene or basic services. The lack of adequate health and industrial infrastructures has been the most prevailing plague of this oil-rich country that yet attracts considerable foreign investments. Skinny women and children go about while the men sit on the ground, watching at the cars passing by. Another day just went by in Chad.

Dear Colleagues,

 
Thank you for your interest in the 2006 Carnegie Foreign Policy Conference.  We would like to take this opportunity to inform you that all conference materials are now available on our event website where you will find a conference agenda, participant list, speaker and moderator biographies, breakout discussion descriptions and summaries, and a photo gallery. We hope these materials will be useful for you. 

This year's conference was a great success and based on the feedback we have received, we expect next year's conference to be truly outstanding. 

Click here to access conference material.

Rational choice theory holds that actors should never choose to fight so long as war is costly, a bargain can be reached short of war, and information is available about who would win a potential armed conflict (Fearon 1995).  Of course, these conditions do not always hold.  In Colombia and Sierra Leone, for instance, rebel groups have found war quite profitable; [1] in Israel and Kashmir, territory is seen to be indivisible; [2] and in the case of the American and Korean civil wars, parties legitimately disagreed over putative military outcomes. [3]  

But even when all three ‘causes of peace’ exist, some groups still choose to fight.  The Russo-Chechen civil war is one such example. [4]   This conflict is clearly costly to both sides, there is no reason to believe that an independent Chechen state would be intolerable for the Russians per se, and it has become apparent that neither the administration in Moscow nor the guerillas in Chechnya have the ability to end the conflict in the foreseeable future.  Orthodox rational choice theory thus fails to explain the prolonged violence of the Chechen Civil War.  So why do the Russians keep fighting it?

One of the most interesting storylines in the philosophical debates inspired by the Iraq War, and the Bush Doctrine generally, has been Johns Hopkins scholar Francis Fukuyama’s split with the neoconservative movement with which he has been closely associated for decades.  As he writes in the excerpt from his new book published this past Sunday in the New York Times Magazine (“After Neoconservatism,” February 20, 2006), he has close professional affiliations with many of the movement’s leading lights including Allan Bloom, himself a protégé of Leo Strauss, Albert Wohlstetter, and Paul Wolfowitz.