IISS Voices

Last week Mike McConnell, outgoing US Director of National Intelligence, unveiled what the Wall Street Journal described as a “sweeping technology program to knit together the thousands of databases across all 16 spy agencies.” According to the Journal, this will “include Facebook-like social-networking programs and classified news feeds.”

The problems this program is meant to address were highlighted two years ago in a Survival article by Douglas Hart and Survival contributing editor Steven Simon. Hart and Simon argued at the time that “recent software advances can provide partial solutions to junior analysts’ critical-thinking shortfalls, the dysfunctional analytical culture of current reporting, and the knowledge boundaries (barriers) within the intelligence community and between the intelligence and policy communities.”

You can read the whole article here.

Dana Allin, Editor, Survival, Senior Fellow for US Foreign Policy and Transatlantic Affairs

The Military Balance 2009 was launched today at the IISS in London. In his press statement, IISS Director-General and Chief Executive, Dr John Chipman, introduced the book and discussed a number of key themes in current strategic and military affairs; afterwards a panel of IISS experts answered questions.

Watch the Launch and the Q&A Session.

Read the Press Statement 

This morning, the launch of The Military Balance 2009 took place. The Military Balance  is the annual assessment of the military capabilities and defence economics of 170 countries worldwide, produced annually by the IISS since 1959.

For the launch, the Military Balance Editor James Hackett produced an Executive Summary of the main points of the book. The Executive summary gives a brief region-by-region assessment of the key defence and military developments of the past year.

Read the Executive Summary

 So this is the big day, to put it mildly. Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, just entered St. John’s Episcopal Church for a brief service before driving to the Capitol steps for his swearing in. More than a million Americans are standing on the frozen Mall doing whatever they can to keep warm until  they can hear the inaugural speech of a President who, five years ago, was an unknown state legislator in Springfield, Illinois. There is talk – one can’t know how loose it is – that the global audience will be on the order of a billion. This is one of the meanings of the ‘global politics’ that is in the subtitle of our journal, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy. Here is the piece I wrote, on the meaning of Obama’s triumph, for the most recent issue.

Dana Allin, Editor, Survival, Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Affairs

In her prepared remarks at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings for her confirmation as Secretary of State yesterday, Senator Hillary Clinton stressed that the United States must use ‘smart power’ in exerting leadership, and she followed up on this approach during later questioning.

Joseph Nye, Jr, who coined the term 'soft power'; was co-chair of the CSIS's bipartisan Commission on Smart Power in 2006-7. He drew on the Commission's work for an article on ‘Recovering American Leadership’ published in Survival last year. Nye argued that the United States is well placed to remain the leading power in the twenty-first century, but it will have to learn to work with other countries to share the leadership role. Washington should adopt a strategy of providing global public goods analogous to the role the UK played in the nineteenth century, and it will need to combine its soft power and hard power resources into a smart power strategy. The paradox of American power in this century, he says, is that the largest power (in relative terms) since the Roman Empire cannot achieve its objectives by acting alone.

A PDF of Nye’s article in Survival, February–March 2008, pp. 55–90, is available free-to-view here.

Jeffrey Mazo, Managing Editor, Survival