An Army field manual (large pdf) published today updates military policy on “stability operations,” referring to the use of military and other instruments of national power “to maintain or reestablish a safe and secure environment, provide essential governmental services, emergency infrastructure reconstruction, and humanitarian relief.”
The new manual “represents a milestone in Army doctrine,” grandly writes Lt. General William B. Caldwell IV. “It is a roadmap from conflict to peace, a practical guidebook for adaptive, creative leadership at a critical time in our history.”
“The manual captures the key lessons of our past, including the hard-won experiences gained through seven years of conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq,” according to a blogger from the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center.
“But this doctrine looks beyond the here and now to address a likely future where threats to our national security emerge from regional conflicts arising from increased competition for scarce natural resources, teeming urban populations with rising popular expectations, unrestrained technological diffusion, and a global economy struggling to overcome the strain of the American financial crisis, meet mounting demands from emerging markets, and extend foreign development aid into third world countries.”
See Stability Operations, U.S. Army Field Manual 3-07, October 6, 2008. The new manual was previewed in the Washington Post on October 5.
Recognizing the power of the national transportation infrastructure expert community and its distributed expertise, ARPA-I took a different route that would instead bring the full collective brainpower to bear around appropriately ambitious ideas.
NIH needs to seriously invest in both the infrastructure and funding to undertake rigorous nutrition clinical trials, so that we can rapidly improve food and make progress on obesity.
Confronting this crisis requires decision-makers to understand the lived realities of wildfire risk and resilience, and to work together across party lines. Safewoods helps make both possible.
Yesterday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed revoking its 2009 “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gases pose a substantial threat to the public. The Federation of American Scientists stands in strong opposition.