Seventeen faculty members and researchers from Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies were hosted at U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM) Headquarters in Hawaii for an intensive orientation on Feb. 4-5. The visit aimed to advance collaboration and to offer a deeper understanding of USPACOM’s operations to Stanford scholars who study international security and Asia.

Admiral Harry B. Harris, Jr., Commander of USPACOM, together with his commanders and staff, welcomed the delegation. Harris’s meeting with Stanford faculty is the second in recent months. The USPACOM visit and earlier speech at Stanford Center at Peking University are part of a series of activities driven by the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative. Led by Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, the Initiative seeks to provide constructive interaction between academic and governmental experts on the many and diverse security challenges facing the Asia-Pacific region.

“Engaging deeply in conversations with those who are on the frontlines is incredibly valuable,” said trip participant Coit Blacker, FSI senior fellow and professor of international studies. “This is especially true for academics who focus much of their attention thinking about the prospects for international peace and security but not necessarily considering their direct application on a military-level.”

[[{"fid":"222122","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"","field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","field_related_image_aspect[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto"},"type":"media","attributes":{"width":"870","style":"line-height: 1.538em;","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto"}}]]

Image

Top: (Left) The Stanford delegation watches a demonstration of a 2-minute drill. / (Right) Karen Eggleston boards a UH-60 Blackhawk helpcopter enroute to the Lightning Academy with her colleagues. Bottom: The delegation takes a group photo on-site.

On the first day, FSI scholars spoke with military officers about the command’s strategies and challenges it faces, such as population aging and sovereignty disputes over the South China Sea. Discussions were followed with a tour of USS Michael Murphy, a guided missile destroyer which routinely conducts operations in the Western Pacific including the South China Sea.

Karen Eggleston, FSI senior fellow and director of the Asia Health Policy Program, was one of the discussants on the USPACOM trip. Her research focuses on health policy in Asia, specifically the effects of demographic change and urbanization.

“As a health economist, the visit yielded for me a behind-the-scenes sense of how members of the military respond to pandemics and humanitarian situations, and of the ongoing dialogue with their counterparts in Asian nations,” Eggleston said. “I think that kind of military-to-military engagement provides an area rich with questions and best practices that could in some ways be shared as a model among other nations.”

Other activities on the first day included a briefing by the U.S. Pacific Fleet command, informal presentations and dialogue between the Stanford participants and the USPACOM staff, and working with senior leaders of the U.S. Pacific Air Forces command.

On the second day, the group visited the U.S. Army’s installation at Schofield Barracks. There, they observed a command post simulation and field exercise including units of the 25^th Infantry Division. Graduates from the U.S. Army’s jungle survival training school also shared their impressions of applying lessons in the field. Researchers from the Asia-Pacific Center for Strategic Studies (APCSS) joined the Stanford delegation later in the day. Both sides discussed research outcomes and avenues for future exchanges. The day concluded with an extensive tour of USS Mississippi, a Virginia-class attack submarine. FSI has long engaged military officers through a senior military fellows program. Started in 2009 by the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the program remains active today with five fellows conducting research at Stanford.

Lt. Col. Jose Sumangil, a 2015-16 U.S. Air Force Senior Military Fellow, participated in the Stanford delegation at USPACOM.

“The trip was an excellent opportunity to showcase how the U.S. ‘rebalance to Asia’ strategy is implemented on a day-to-day basis – for example, providing a look into the decision-making process that could occur should a situation arise in the South China Sea,” Sumangil said. “It’s incredibly important to build this kind of understanding among experts studying Asia, and I think we helped do that here.”

USPACOM is one of the largest U.S. military commands with four major service components (U.S. Pacific Fleet, U.S. Pacific Air Forces, U.S. Army Pacific, U.S. Marine Forces); it is tasked with protecting U.S. people and interests, and enhancing stability in the Asia-Pacific Region.

A shadowy terror group smuggles a crude nuclear bomb into the United States, then detonates it right in the heart of Washington D.C., setting off a 15 kiloton explosion.

Eighty thousand Americans are killed instantly, including the president, vice president and most of the members of Congress, and more than a hundred thousand more are seriously wounded.

News outlets are soon broadcasting a message they’ve all received from a group claiming responsibility.

It says there are five more bombs hidden in five different cities across the America, and one bomb will be set off each week for the next five weeks unless all American troops based overseas are ordered to immediately return to the U.S. homeland.

The nation is thrown into chaos, as millions scramble to flee the cities, clogging roads and choking telecommunications systems.

The stock market crashes, before trading is halted altogether.

Martial law is declared, amid widespread looting and violence.

That was just one of the nightmare scenarios for a potential nuclear disaster that former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry vividly described as he delivered the Center for International Security and Cooperation’s annual Drell Lecture on Wednesday.

“My bottom line is that the likelihood of a nuclear catastrophe today is greater than it was during the Cold War,” Perry said.

Most people were “blissfully unaware” of the danger that simmering conflicts in geopolitical flash points around the globe – including Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and Pakistan – could easily turn nuclear, Perry told the Stanford audience.

A new nuclear arms race with Russia

Perry said he had tried to foster closer cooperation between the U.S. and Russia when he headed the Pentagon during the mid ‘90s and helped oversee the joint dismantling of four thousand nuclear weapons.

“When I left the Pentagon, I believed we were well on the way to ending forever that Cold War enmity, but that was not to be,” he said.

William J. Perry shares a video depicting the threat of nuclear terrorism with a Stanford audience.

Since then, relations between the West and Russia have soured badly, prompting Russia to modernize its nuclear arsenal and assume a more aggressive nuclear posture.

“They’re well advanced in rebuilding their Cold War nuclear arsenal, and it is Putin’s stated first priority,” Perry said.

“And they have dropped their former policy of no first use of nuclear weapons, and replaced it with a policy that says nuclear weapons will be their weapon of choice if they are threatened.”

While Perry said he believed Russian president Vladimir Putin did not want to engage in a military conflict with NATO forces, he said he was concerned about the possibility of Russia making a strategic miscalculation and stumbling into a conflict where they might resort to the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

“If they did that there’s no way of predicting or controlling the escalation that would follow thereafter,” Perry said.

Chinese economic problems increasing tensions

In Asia, a slowing Chinese economy could exacerbate domestic political tensions over issues such as wealth inequality and pollution, and encourage Chinese leaders to divert attention from problems at home by focusing on enemies abroad.

“China has had more than 10 percent growth now for almost three decades, but I think there’s trouble ahead,” Perry said.

“The time-proven safety valve for any government that’s in trouble is ultra-nationalism, which in the case of China translates into anti-Americanism and anti-Japanese.”

China has seen a major growth in military expenditures over the last decade, and it has used that investment to build a blue water navy and develop effective anti-ship missiles designed to drive the U.S. Navy hundreds of miles back from the Chinese coastline.

One potential flash point for a conflict between China and the U.S. are the artificial islands that China has been building in the disputed waters of the South China Sea.

“In a sense, China is regarding the South China Sea as a domestic lake, and we regard it and most other countries regard it as international waters, so their actions have been challenged by the U.S. Navy and will continue to be challenged,” Perry said.

North Korea’s growing nuclear threat

Meanwhile, China’s neighbor North Korea has continued to defy the international community and conducted another nuclear test in January.

“North Korea is today building a nuclear arsenal, and I would say clearly it’s of the highest priority in their government, and they have adopted outrageous rhetoric about how they might use those nuclear weapons,” Perry said.

William J. Perry delivers the Drell Lecture in an address entitled "A National Security Walk Around the World."

“These missiles today have only conventional warheads that are of no significant concern, but they are developing nuclear warheads,” Perry said.

“They already have developed a nuclear bomb, and the latest test, as well as tests to come, will be designed to perfect a bomb small enough and compact enough and durable enough to fit into a warhead. If they succeed in doing that, then the bluster will become a real threat.”

Perry said he hoped China and the United States could combine forces and adopt a “carrot and stick” diplomatic approach to force North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program – with the United States offering aid and international recognition, and China threatening to cut off supplies of food and aid.

He said he expected to see “more acting out” from the North Korean regime in the coming months, in the form of further nuclear and rocket tests.

Like it or not, the Iran deal is the only deal we’ll get

The landmark deal reached last year, where Iran agree to curtail its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions, was a better resolution than Perry had expected to the negotiations, but it has met with significant resistance from groups he described as “strange bedfellows.”

“The opposition in Israel and the United States opposed the deal because they fear it will allow Iran to get a bomb,” Perry said.

“Whereas the opposition in Iran opposed the deal because they fear it will prevent Iran from getting a bomb. Both cannot be right.”

Many Republican presidential hopefuls have publicly stated on the campaign trail that they would withdraw from the deal if they got elected to the White House, but Perry said that would be a strategic mistake.

“The opposition in the United States has a simple formula – we should withdraw from the deal, we should reinstate sanctions, and we should renegotiate a better deal,” Perry said.

“Let me be as blunt as I can, this is a pure fantasy. There is not the remotest possibility that the sanction could be reapplied if the United States withdraws from this deal, because the day we withdraw from the deal, our allies are gone, the sanctions are gone, there will be no renegotiations without sanctions, so this deal, like it or not, is the only deal we will ever get.”

Another “Mumbai” attack could spark regional nuclear war

Nuclear rivals India and Pakistan have more than a hundred nuclear weapons on each side, as well as the missiles to deliver them, and a conventional military conflict between them could quickly escalate into a regional nuclear war, Perry said.

Another large-scale terror attack, like the coordinated assault in Mumbai that killed more than 163 people in 2008, could lead India to retaliate militarily against Pakistan (which India blames for encouraging the terror groups operating in Pakistani territory).

Perry said he was concerned that Pakistan would then use tactical nuclear weapons against invading Indian troops, and that India might then respond with a nuclear attack of its own on Pakistan.

“So this is the nightmare scenario of how a regional nuclear war could start,” Perry said.

“A nightmare that would involve literally tens of millions of deaths, along with the possibility of stimulating a nuclear winter that would cause widespread tragedies all over the planet.”

A ray of hope

Despite all the potential for nuclear disaster in the current geopolitical environment, Perry said he was still hopeful that nuclear catastrophe could be avoided.

"While much of my talk today has a doomsday ring to it, that truly is not who I am,” Perry said.

“I’m basically an optimist. When I see a cloud, I look for a ray to shine through that cloud.”

One important step toward reducing the nuclear threat would be improving relations between the U.S. and Russia, he said.

“My ray of sunshine, my hope, is I believe we can still reverse the slide in U.S. Russia relations, he said.

“We must begin that by restoring civil dialog. We must restore cooperation between the United States and Russia in areas where we have mutual interest…If we succeed in doing that, then we can work to stop and reverse the drift to a greater and greater dependence on nuclear weapons.”

Perry ended his speech by urging the audience to keep striving to rid the world of the threat of nuclear weapons.

“We must pursue our ideals in order to keep alive our hope – hope for a safer world for our children and for our grandchildren,” he said.

As part of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy speaker series, Director of The Markaz: Resource Center Mona Damluji examined the impact of the US-led occupation of Iraq on sectarian-based urban segregation in Baghdad. In a talk held on February 3, 2016, she argued that the sectarian-based segregation that has shaped urbanism in Baghdad is a direct outcome of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. The "post"-occupied city is characterized by the normalization of concrete “security” blast-walls that choke urban circulation and sever communities. The notorious blast walls -- or "Bremer Walls" -- perpetuate and intensify conditions of urban segregation. As the summer's surge of anti-government protests in Baghdad demonstrate, the short-sighted nature of this militarized solution to sectarian-based violence has proven to be a superficial and unsustainable fix to the deep dilemma of sectarian segregation codified in Iraq’s political system. The presentation also examined the context for recent public dissent on the streets of Baghdad through the story of the capital city's fragmentation between 2006 and 2007.

Stanford researchers working with the U.S. Navy’s Marine Mammal Program in San Diego have discovered a startling variety of newly-recognized bacteria living inside the highly trained dolphins that the Navy uses to protect its ships and submarines, find submerged sea mines and detect underwater intruders. They found similar types of bacteria in wild dolphins as well.

“About three quarters of the bacterial species we found in the dolphins’ mouths are completely new to us,” said David Relman, Stanford professor of microbiology and medicine, and co-author of a paper published in the journal Nature Communications on Wednesday.

A U.S. Navy dolphin opens its mouth for a swab to collect bacterial samples.

“Bacteria are among the most well-studied microbes, so it was surprising to discover the degree to which the kinds of bacteria we found were types that have never been described,” he said. “What novelty means is not just new names of species, families, classes or phyla…there’s reason to believe that along with this taxonomic novelty, there’s functional novelty.”

The U.S. Navy has been training dolphins and sea lions to carry out defensive military missions from their bases in San Diego and elsewhere since the early 1960s.

Over the years, it has also funded scientific research and become the single largest contributor to the scientific literature on marine mammals, producing more than 800 publications, according to the Navy.

Relman started working with the Navy more than 15 years ago to identify bacteria suspected of causing stomach ulcers in their dolphins.

His latest project to catalog the bacterial communities (or microbiota) living inside the dolphins began when the Navy asked him to help develop a probiotic bacterial strain that could keep their dolphins healthy, or help sick dolphins get better.

Navy trainers took regular swabs from the dolphins’ mouths and rectal areas, using what looked like a Q-tip, and shipped the samples to Stanford on dry ice for analysis.

Stanford researchers analyzed oral, rectal and gastric samples from the U.S. Navy's dolphins and sea lions, as well as samples from the dolphins' blowholes and the surrounding water.

The study found a similar amount of diversity and novelty in bacterial samples taken from wild dolphins living in Sarasota Bay off the west coast of Florida, although there were slight differences in the bacteria from the dolphins’ mouths.

Relman said he hoped to develop a profile of the normal microbial communities in healthy dolphins and other marine mammals, so that scientists could detect any early change that might signify an imminent disease, or health problems caused by climate change and ocean warming.

“There’s a lot of concern about the changing conditions of the oceans and what the impact could be on the health of wild marine mammals,” Relman said. “We would love to be able to develop a diagnostic test that would tell us when marine mammals are beginning to suffer from the ill effects of a change in their environment.”

The research could help solve other mysteries, such as how dolphins digest their food, even though they swallow fish whole without chewing them.

The key could be a unique bacterial group that’s also been identified in an endangered species of freshwater dolphins living in China’s Yangtze River, said Elisabeth Bik, a research associate at the Stanford Department of Medicine and lead author on the paper.

“It’s a very intriguing bacterial group that nobody has seen before in any other terrestrial animal group,” said Bik. “I would really love to know more about those bacteria and sequence their genomes to understand more about their functional capacity.”

Zak, a 375-pound California sea lion, shows his teeth during a training swim. Zak has been trained to locate swimmers near piers, ships, and other objects in the water considered suspicious and a possible threat to military forces in the area.

“The sea lions and dolphins are kept at the same facility, they’re fed exactly the same fish, and they’re swimming in the same water…but they’re very, very different in terms of microbiota,” Bik said.

Unlike dolphins, sea lions share many common types of bacteria with their terrestrial cousins.

“Sea lions weren’t that different from other carnivores like dogs and cats,” Bik said. “They’re evolutionarily related to them, and their microbiota looks very similar to those animals. But dolphins don’t really have a terrestrial mammal that’s closely related, and their microbiota looks very different from anything else that people have seen.”

Relman said his team was planning on expanding their study to include other marine mammals such as sea otters, killer whales, baleen whales, grey whales, harbor seals, elephant seals and manatees. Their purpose, in part, is to understand how life in the sea, over the millions of years since the return of mammals, may have shaped the structure of their microbial communities and the roles they play in marine mammal health.

They’re already working to analyze more than 80 samples of killer whale stool that the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has gathered with the help of specially trained sniffer dogs, which stand on the bow of their boats and point to fresh killer whale feces before it sinks.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife is contributing samples from the sea otters and seals it studies as part of its conservation, ecological, and monitoring programs.

And the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, which is the West Coast’s largest rescue and rehabilitation facility for marine mammals, is sending samples from the seals in its care.

Relman said the research could help scientists begin to answer fundamental questions about life in the ocean.

“Marine mammals remain one of the more poorly understood habitats for studying microbial life, and there would be lots of reasons for thinking that these are important environments to study, in part because of the relevance for the health of these marine mammals, but also because they represent a view into what it means to live in the sea and the nature of our relationship with this vast aspect of our environment,” Relman said.

Collaborators and co-authors on this study included Stephanie Venn-Watson and Kevin Carlin from the National Marine Mammal Foundation, and Eric Jensen from the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific, in San Diego.

An anti-poverty aid program that’s been implemented in the Philippines for nearly a decade is gaining attention for the progress it has made in not only helping the poor, but also for its role in decreasing political violence and insurgency.

Joe Felter, senior research scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and research fellow at the Hoover Institution, presented the results of his joint research on the program before senior political figures at a conference in the Philippine capital of Manila in January.

CISAC senior research scholar Joe Felter (left) joins Philippine President Benigno Aquino (right) and the Secretary of the Department of Social Welfare and Development Corazon “Dinky” Soliman (center) onstage at a conference on sustaining the gains of the conditional cash transfer program held in Manila in January, 2016.

“We worked for several years on this study and it was a privilege to provide these findings and results to senior officials in the Philippine government who are in a position to act on them,” said Felter. “It’s really gratifying to know that academic research can contribute to actual improvements in the conditions, livelihood and safety of those in need.”

The focus of the conference was on the conditional cash-transfer (CCT) anti-poverty aid program called Pantawid Pamilya. Administered by Soliman’s Department of Social Welfare and Development, the Philippines began deploying the program in 2007. It is similar to other CCT programs used in Brazil, Columbia, India, Indonesia and Mexico where households must meet certain income thresholds and basic health and education requirements to qualify for its benefits. CCT programs distribute cash payments to targeted poor households and are proving to be an increasingly popular tool for reducing poverty and improving livelihoods in poverty-affected areas.

The effect of aid on conflict

Felter and his colleagues conducted an analysis of the impact of aid on civil conflict that takes advantage of a randomized control trial (RCT) initiated in the Philippines by the World Bank in 2009 as part of an impact evaluation of the Pantawid Pamilya CCT program. Impact evaluations of CCT programs to date limit their findings to those areas the program was intended to address such as health, education, and employment. Published in the January 2016 Journal of Development Economics, the study estimates the effect of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs on two other critical outcomes- civil conflict and insurgent influence.

CISAC senior research scholar Joe Felter shakes hands with Philippine President Benigno Aquino onstage at a conference in the Philippine capital of Manila.

“Considering the types of conflicts taking place around the globe, it is both timely and important to study how aid can be delivered in a manner that reduces poverty without exacerbating conflict,” said Felter. “Development aid can sometimes have the unintended effect of increasing conflict in civil wars when insurgents believe the successful implementation of government-sponsored development projects will boost support for the government and undermine their position.” 

Felter himself is no stranger to international conflict. He retired from the U.S. Army as a colonel in 2012 following a career as a Special Forces and foreign area officer that took him on missions to Central America, Southeast Asia, Afghanistan, and Iraq.  Now in academia, he uses data and rigorous quantitative methods to help those in the field better understand and more effectively and efficiently approach the challenges of stabilizing conflict areas through development aid and economic assistance. 

Despite the growing popularity of CCTs, and assessments of their effectiveness at reducing poverty and improving livelihood, there is limited evidence on how the payment programs affect the civil conflict often present in these poverty stricken areas. Felter, along with his coauthors Benjamin Crost of the University of Illinois, and Patrick Johnston of RAND Corporation, took advantage of the World Bank’s randomized experiment to identify the effect CCT programs had on conflict-related incidents and the influence of insurgent groups, even though the experiment was not originally designed to study the effect of Pantawid Pamilya on these outcomes. Their research compared these aspects of the CCT program’s impact in treatment villages to control villages in the Philippines from 2009-2011.

The Philippines is home to some of the world’s most protracted civil conflicts, including a separatist insurgency in Mindanao island with roots dating back to Spanish colonial times, and a decades long communist insurgency affecting nearly all of the country’s provinces across this archipelago.

“Studying the impact of conditional cash transfers on political violence and insurgent influence in the Philippines is especially instructive and generalizable because you have multiple, long-running insurgencies, each with distinct characteristics, and with an array of government sponsored aid programs implemented in these areas over time,” said Felter.

Two key findings resulted from the team’s analysis. First, the CCT program caused a substantial reduction in the number of conflict-related incidents in the villages where it was administered. Second, the program was effective at reducing insurgent influence in the treated villages. Significantly, their findings provide evidence that the effects of CCTs can differ from other types of aid interventions based on the type of aid provided and how it is implemented.

“That Pantawid Pamilya helped reduce the presence of rebel groups in the targeted villages is especially consequential.” Felter said. “A program that reduces violence by weakening insurgent influence is likely to have more beneficial long-term effects since insurgent influence can still undermine the rule of law and oppress citizens even without violence.”

Not all aid programs created equal

An effective aid program such as this can result in more than an economic boost for a village or community and a reduction in violence. It can also provide a psychological victory that enables the government to gain increased support from the local population – effectively “winning hearts and minds” – thus potentially enabling the government to gain better security through increased cooperation and information sharing about insurgents from the population. This is a win-win result, especially in regions where insurgents often gain support by exposing weaknesses of the government, not just through fear and coercion. Insurgents win when they are able to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of a local population whose own government is unable to provide for their basic needs.

However, a “winning hearts and minds” strategy for disbursing government aid can sometimes backfire depending on how these programs are carried out. For example, KALAHI-CIDSS, a large-scale community-driven development (CDD) infrastructure program took place in similar regions in the Philippines during the same time period as the Pantawid Pamilya experiment period. This aid program was also implemented by the DSWD, but in some cases led to different and unintended results. The CDD program was designed to empower the poorest Filipino municipalities through enhanced participation in community projects and training, but the way in which the projects were determined and the mechanisms they were delivered created incentives and opportunities for insurgents to attack the projects, resulting in increased local conflict in some cases where the program was implemented. CDD programs involve a series of public meetings and result in the implementation of widely publicized and often highly visible infrastructure projects. As a result, insurgents often attack these government “hearts and minds” initiatives that, if successful, threaten to shift popular support away from their rebel groups and towards the government.

In contrast to CDD programs, CCT programs disburse aid directly to its beneficiaries’ bank accounts, making it difficult for insurgents to anticipate when and where the transfers are occurring and inhibiting their capacity to disrupt and dismantle the program. The findings in Felter’s study provide preliminary evidence that the type of aid and mechanism in which it is delivered can be a major factor in determining its impact on civil conflict.

“The stakes are high in human and economic terms when it comes to stabilizing conflict areas and preventing a return of the deadly violence associated with civil wars and insurgency,” said Felter.

The results of this study provide rare empirical evidence that some forms of aid, and how it is implemented can reduce the intensity of civil conflict and the influence of the groups responsible for it. This evidence can help governments determine what type of aid to invest in to achieve their desired results.

“Distributing aid effectively and achieving maximum benefits from these investments is definitely a challenge and an area where more research is needed to better appreciate the many nuances and complexities of these efforts,” said Felter.

During the two-day conference in Manila, President Aquino noted how his administration had increased the CCT budget to cover close to 4.4 million poor households, up from 786,000 five years ago.

You can read Felter’s full paper in the January issue of the Journal of Development Economics.

David Shear, assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs, visited Stanford on Jan. 22 for a daylong series of discussions on the state of U.S. defense strategy in the Asia-Pacific region.

Shear facilitated a closed-door dialogue with Stanford-based senior military fellows studying national security issues at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Hoover Institution.

Shear also met with faculty members of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Center for International Security and Cooperation, and delivered a lecture to a packed audience at Encina Hall.

The events were sponsored by the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative led by Ambassador Karl Eikenberry. The initiative seeks to produce research outcomes and constructive interaction between academic and governmental experts on security challenges facing the Asia-Pacific region. More information about the initiative can be found here.

To mark five years since the onset of the January 25 Revolution, five Egypt scholars examined the evolving political landscape in Egypt as part of a panel titled “The Containment of Politics in Egypt,” organized by the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy (ARD). The panel featured Stanford Historian Joel Beinin, Associate Professor of Political Science at Stanford Lisa Blaydes, ARD Visiting Scholar Amr Hamzawy, Executive Director of the Tahrir Institute on Middle East Policy Nancy Okail, and ARD Associate Director Hesham Sallam. The discussion revolved around a number of key issues, including the recent legislative elections, the cohesion of the ruling coalition, the regime’s responses to various economic challenges, and the impact of state repression on spaces for political contestation and resistance.

U.S. Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James speaks at a roundtable on cyber policy at Stanford University on January 6, 2016.

The U.S. military needs to train and recruit more “cyber warriors,” and improve its offensive and defensive capabilities in cyberspace, Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James said during a visit to Stanford University last week.

“Today we’re not sufficiently strategizing, organizing, training or equipping to be cyber warriors,” James said at a roundtable discussion on cyber policy. “We’ve made progress over the last year or two, but it’s not good enough. We need to do more, to be open to different ways of bringing people on and retaining people so we can bring the best and brightest into our ranks.”

She called on Silicon Valley to “move past the debate over Edward Snowden and the debate over encryption” and help the military combat cyber threats to U.S. national security. “Particularly here in Silicon Valley, how can we get better access…and work better with some of the great innovations here in Silicon Valley?” she asked.

U.S. Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James (left) meets with former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry (second from right) and former Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and George P. Shultz (far right) during a visit to Stanford University on January 6, 2016.

Stanford University was just one of the stops on James’ schedule, which also included meetings at Google, Facebook, FireEye and In-Q-Tel (the investment arm of the U.S. intelligence community).

James said she’d come to Silicon Valley to “listen and learn” and search for “the next big thing” – from drones to big data.

“We’re actively on the hunt for what will be our next advantage as the military,” she said.

She said the military was working to streamline its procurement process so it could move more quickly fund new technological development using what she called “rapid acquisition.”

“You can’t build the next fighter aircraft under this, but you can build smaller types of technological products and get something under contract within 30 days,” she said.

Protecting networked weapons systems and critical infrastructure at military bases were two top priorities for the Air Force, James said.

It is also working to develop better defensive capabilities to protect satellites and other assets in space, and prevent adversaries from disabling critical missile warning and global positions systems, James said.

“Space had been a fairly tranquil, uncontested area,” she said.

“Nowadays, space is much more contested and congested. There are many more companies and countries up there.

“If a conflict on earth bleeds into space in some way, how do we defend our constellation?”

Military operations centers will need to integrate more cyber capabilities in order to create more options for defense and offense, James said.

“What we need in future is a multi-domain operations center where we’re fully plugged in terms of cyber and space...so that a commander at every turn has military options that go beyond bombing a target,” she said.

“The President, the Secretary of Defense, everybody is pressing, ‘We want more options. We want more targets.’.”

But James acknowledged that even digital conflict could cause collateral damage in the physical world.

“Let’s say we take out a power grid to shut down a particular part of a country to stop a military action,” she said.  “Maybe you’d shut off power to a hospital and people would die.”

That’s why cyber operations would continue to be governed by the law of armed conflict.

“Before a cyber target would be hit, there would be a legal decision with other parts of the government,” James said. “It’s not solely [up to] a commander on the scene.”

In an indication of the growing importance of cyber operations, political and military leadership in Washington are considering elevating U.S. Cyber Command from under U.S. Strategic Command to become its own unified command, James said.

The Air Force currently has around 1,700 personnel working directly on cyber offense and defense, spread among the National Guard, Reserves and active duty. And it recently established a new Cyber College at Air University on Maxwell Air Force base in Montgomery, Alabama to train more internal talent.

But military leaders are also looking for other ways to scale up their cyber forces, James said.

“Maybe leveraging the private sector and leveraging Silicon Valley can help us,” she said.

Stanford nuclear experts said they were skeptical of North Korea’s claim that it had detonated a hydrogen bomb this week.

However, they said the test was an important step forward for North Korea’s nuclear program and would have a destabilizing effect on the entire region.

“I don’t believe it was a real hydrogen bomb, but my greatest concern is not so much whether or not they actually tested a hydrogen bomb, but rather that they tested at all,” said Siegfried Hecker, former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory and senior fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has “a track record of exaggerated statements, hyperbole and outright lies,” according to Scott Sagan, Caroline S.G. Munro professor of Political Science.

“The propaganda machine in North Korea has made all sorts of claims about Kim Jong-un’s personal prowess and his history, and it is totally unsurprising that he might make exaggerated claims about North Korea’s military prowess,” Sagan said.

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry said he also doubted that North Korea had detonated a two-stage hydrogen bomb.

“Whether it’s a hydrogen bomb or not, it’s very dangerous, destabilizing development,” said Perry.

“It’s obvious they’re working to increase the capability and size of their nuclear arsenal and that represents a huge danger to the region and creates major instability and major concerns on the part of South Korea and Japan.”

Many North Korea watchers had been anticipating another nuclear test.

“We’ve thought that the North Koreans could test at any time – that the tunnels were ready, that they could do this at any time – so it would be a political decision, not a technical decision,” said Thomas Fingar, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Hecker said North Korea’s latest nuclear test would move the country closer to being able to miniaturize a nuclear warhead and mount it on a missile, extending the reach of their nuclear weapons.

“They will have achieved greater sophistication in their bomb design – that is the most worrisome aspect,” Hecker said.

“At this point, what makes their nuclear arsenal more dangerous is not so much explosive power of the bomb, but its size, weight and the ability to deliver it with missiles.”

On the diplomatic agenda, the U.S. and its allies will likely push for stronger sanctions in the wake of the tests, according to Kathleen Stephens, a former U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Korea and William J. Perry fellow at Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC).

“In the UN the U.S., Japan and South Korea will likely look for another, and stronger, UN Security Council resolution, presumably with some efforts to attach to it some teeth and strengthen sanctions,” Stephens said.

The U.S. Congress is currently considering financial sanctions that would cut of all access to U.S. banks for any banks dealing with the North Koreans.

But financial sanctions would likely be less effective in dealing with North Korea than they had been with Iran, according to Fingar.

“It’s like hitting a masochist,” said Fingar.

“North Korea is relatively insulated from the external economy, where Iran wasn’t. Iran had a middle class, you could make sanctions hurt, they could have a real effect. You could make it hard for the North Koreans to buy luxury goods, but at the end of the day, is that going to bring down the regime?”

Financial sanctions against North Korea could have the unintended consequence of also hurting China, said David Straub, associate director of the Korea program at APARC.

“This could be problematic for China because many of the transactions that North Korea conducts would be going thorough Chinese banks, and the Chinese, understandably might not be happy about the US financial sanctions on them, in effect,” Straub said.

Perry recommended that the U.S. reinvigorate diplomatic talks with North Korea in collaboration with China, South Korea, Japan and Russia.

“I would not give up on negotiations with North Korea yet,” Perry said.

“What could have been done many years ago was following through on negotiations with North Korea at the turn of the Century, which were proceeding robustly in the last years of Clinton’s second term, but were abandoned by the Bush Administration...That was a geo-strategic error.”

But Hecker said those negotiations would be harder now.

“I have previously argued that we should focus on three “No’s” for three “Yes’s” – that is no more bombs, no better bombs (meaning no testing) and no export – in return for addressing the North’s security concerns, its energy shortage and its economic woes,” said Hecker.

“This could have worked when I first proposed it 2008 after one of my seven visits to North Korea. It will be more difficult now."