The Department of Defense has updated its policy on “humanitarian and civic assistance activities,” which are “conducted in conjunction with authorized military operations” abroad. See DoD Instruction 2205.02 (pdf), December 2, 2008.
Medical assistance is a potentially important element of counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, argued a senior military medical officer earlier this year. See “The Role of Medical Diplomacy in Stabilizing Afghanistan” (pdf), by Donald F. Thompson, Defense Horizons, May 2008. (Interestingly, however, he noted that such assistance can sometimes backfire by “undercutting the confidence of the local population in their own government’s ability to provide essential services.”)
Former Senator Bill Frist has called for increased investment in medical diplomacy, and warned against letting U.S. adversaries get “ahead” on this front.
“We cannot allow countries in direct security and economic competition with America … to use health diplomacy as a means of building new alliances, attracting new followers, or otherwise strengthening their position vis-a-vis our nation,” he wrote (pdf) in Yale Law and Policy Review (Fall 2007).
With targeted policy interventions, we can efficiently and effectively support the U.S. innovation economy through the translation of breakthrough scientific research from the lab to the market.
Crowd forecasting methods offer a systematic approach to quantifying the U.S. intelligence community’s uncertainty about the future and predicting the impact of interventions, allowing decision-makers to strategize effectively and allocate resources by outlining risks and tradeoffs in a legible format.
The energy transition underway in the United States continues to present a unique set of opportunities to put Americans back to work through the deployment of new technologies, infrastructure, energy efficiency, and expansion of the electricity system to meet our carbon goals.
The United States has the only proven and scalable tritium production supply chain, but it is largely reserved for nuclear weapons. Excess tritium production capacity should be leveraged to ensure the success of and U.S. leadership in fusion energy.