In today's dynamic strategic environment, political changes can become challenges very quickly. Any list of key strategic issues must, therefore, include the broadest array of regional and functional concerns. This is a catalogue of significant issues, arranged as potential research topics, of concern to U.S. policymakers. KSIL entries are intended to be general enough for researchers to modify or expand appropriately, and to adapt to a variety of methodologies. While the list of general topics is broad, it is neither comprehensive nor restrictive. Researchers are encouraged to contact any of the SSI points of contact, or those found in the Expanded KSIL, for further information regarding their desired topics. These points of contact are not necessarily subject experts, but can recommend experts or additional sponsors.
The purpose of the Key Strategic Issues List (KSIL) is to provide military and civilian researchers a ready reference for issues of special interest to the Department of the Army and the Department of Defense (DoD). Unlike other lists that generally reflect issues which are operational or tactical in nature, the focus of the KSIL is strategic. It highlights topics that senior Army and DoD leaders should consider in providing military advice and formulating military strategy. At present, the U.S. military is engaged in a changing situation in Iraq and an increasing presence in Afghanistan, as well as efforts to restore balance in force sizing and structure. With the publication of the 2009 KSIL, the Strategic Studies Institute and the U.S. Army War College invite all researchers to contribute to informing America's leaders of current and emerging challenges.
Sponsored by the Army Capabilities Integration Center and in collaboration with the Joint Staff's Deputy Directorate for Global Operations (Strategic Multi-Layer Assessment Branch), this report examines the emergence of gray zone competition and conflict as important pacers for U.S. defense strategy. The authors argue that gray zone challenges are unique defense-relevant issues sharing three common characteristics-hybridity, menace to defense and military convention, and profound and paralyzing risk-confusion. This report and its authors offer an important opening venture into a vexing strategic question for senior defense and military leadership on the subject of gray zone threats. Namely, how can the American defense enterprise adjust to an era of relentless revisionist and rejectionist opposition to U.S. power? On the one hand, purposeful U.S. competitors pursue meaningful revision of the U.S.-led status quo through campaign-quality combinations of influence, intimidation, coercion, and aggression.
Both Henry Kissinger and Robert Art make it clear that the identification of national interests is crucial for the development of policy and strategy. Interests are essential to establishing the objectives or ends that serve as the goals for policy and strategy. "Interests are the foundation and starting point for policy prescriptions." They help answer questions concerning why a policy is important.4 National interests also help to determine the types and amounts of the national power employed as the means to implement a designated policy or strategy. The concept of interest is not new to the 21st century international system. It has always been a fundamental consideration of every actor in the system. Despite what many academics have maintained, national interests are not only a factor for nation-states. All actors in the international system possess interests. Using Barry Buzan, Ole Weaver, and Jaap de Wilde's units of analysis, the need to have interests is equally applicable to international subsystems (groups or units that can be distinguished from the overall system by the nature or intensity of their interactions with or independence on each other) like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, individual units (actors consisting of various subgroups, orga¬nizations, and communities) such as nations of people that transcend state boundaries and multi¬national corporations, subunits (organized groups of individuals within units that are able or try to affect the behavior of the unit as a whole) like bureaucracies and lobbies, and finally, individuals that all possess separate personal interests as they participate in the overall system.5 Some academ¬ics choose to distinguish between national interests (interests involved in the external relations of the actor) and public interests (interests related within the boundaries of the actor).6 For purposes of this essay, given the closing gap between the influence of external and internal issues in the 21st century international system brought about by the associated components of a rapidly globalized world, there will be no distinction made between external and internal interests. In effect, they all fall under the concept of the national interest. There is a generally accepted consensus among academics that interests are designed to be of value to the entity or actor responsible for determining the interest for itself. This could include 4 those interests that are intended to be "a standard of conduct or a state of affairs worthy of achieve¬ment by virtue of its universal moral value."7 However, there is less agreement over the question of whether all nation-state interests are enduring, politically bi-partisan, permanent conditions that represent core interests that transcend changes in government,8 in contrast to those interests that may be altered over time and or respond to change in the international system.
Cyber is now recognized as an operational domain, but the theory that should explain it strategically is, for the most part, missing. It is one thing to know how to digitize; it is quite another to understand what digitization means strategically. The author maintains that, although the technical and tactical literature on cyber is abundant, strategic theoretical treatment is poor. He offers four conclusions: (1) cyber power will prove useful as an enabler of joint military operationsl; (2) cyber offense is likely to achieve some success, and the harm we suffer is most unlikely to be close to lethally damaging; (3) cyber power is only information and only one way in which we collect, store, and transmit information; and (4) it is clear enough today that the sky is not falling because of cyber peril. As a constructed environment, cyberspace is very much what we choose to make it.
On August 24-25, 2010, the National Defense University held a conference titled “Economic Security: Neglected Dimension of National Security?” to explore the economic element of national power. This special collection of selected papers from the conference represents the view of several keynote speakers and participants in six panel discussions. It explores the complexity surrounding this subject and examines the major elements that, interacting as a system, define the economic component of national security.
