Sponsored by

The Preventive Defense Project and the

CISAC Science Seminar Series

Roughly 85% of the critical infrastructure systems in the United States is owned or operated by the private sector. Managers of these systems must keep everything running and try to ensure nothing bad happens, despite increasing system complexity and demand for continuing improvements in efficiency. This challenge naturally leads to the questions “which parts of an infrastructure are critical,” “how critical are they,” and “how should we invest limited budget to defend our infrastructure?”

We introduce two- and three-stage optimization models that represent the strategic, game-theoretic interactions between preparations to defend critical infrastructure, an “attacker” who observes these preparations before acting, and a “defender” who operates the surviving infrastructure as best as possible after an optimal attack. We identify worst-case disruptions in the operation of a system by solving a system interdiction problem. Then, given an available budget and list of possible defensive investments (e.g., hardening, redundancy, capacity expansion), we solve for a combination of investments that makes the system maximally resilient to worst-case disruption. We show some unexpected results that have proven insightful.

These models apply equally well to government, military, and commercial systems. Between our NPS student-officers and faculty, we have conducted over 150 case studies on systems ranging from electric power, to transportation, to supply chains, to the Internet.

About the speaker: David L. Alderson, Ph.D, joined the Naval Postgraduate School faculty in 2006 after working for three years as a postdoctoral scholar in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He received a B.S.E. in Civil Engineering and Operations Research from Princeton University and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. His research focuses on the function and operation of critical infrastructures, with particular emphasis on how to invest limited resources to ensure efficient and resilient performance in the face of accidents, failures, natural disasters, or deliberate attacks. He currently serves as the Director of the NPS Center for Infrastructure Defense (CID). As part of a Multiple University Research Initiative (MURI) team studying "Next-Generation Network Science," he studies tradeoffs between efficiency, complexity, and fragility in a wide variety of public and private network-centric systems. He has extensive experience working on the Internet and other complex communication networks, having been a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), and the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) at UCLA. He is a member of INFORMS and MORS.

Karl Eikenberry is the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Within FSI he is an affiliated faculty member with the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), and an affiliated researcher with the Europe Center. Before coming to Stanford, he served as U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from May 2009 to July 2011, where he led the civilian side of the surge directed by President Obama to reverse Taliban momentum and help set the conditions for transition to full Afghan sovereignty.

Prior to his appointment as Chief of Mission in Kabul, Ambassador Eikenberry had a 35-year career with the U.S. Army, retiring with the rank of Lieutenant General in 2009.  His operational posts include service in the continental U.S., Hawaii, Korea, Italy, and Afghanistan, where he served as Commander of the American-led Coalition Forces from 2005-2007.

Ambassador Eikenberry also served in various political-military positions, including service as Deputy Chairman of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Military Committee in Brussels.

His military awards include the Defense Distinguished and Superior Service Medals, Legion of Merit, Bronze Star, Ranger Tab, Combat and Expert Infantryman badges, and master parachutist wings. He has received numerous civilian awards as well.

Amb. Eikenberry is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, holds master's degrees from Harvard University in East Asian Studies and Stanford University in Political Science, and was a National Security Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

He is a trustee of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Council of American Ambassadors. He recently received the George F. Kennan Award for Distinguished Public Service from the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. He has published numerous articles on U.S. military training, tactics, and strategy and on Chinese military history and Asia-Pacific security issues.

Abstract:  

The "spirit of democracy" has recently been undermined in several African countries as authoritarian methods have been the preferred approach. In countries such as Kenya, Zimbabwe, Cote d'Ivoire, Niger and Gabon political change has come through the following means; military interventions ousting former presidents clinging to power after their terms; violently repressed popular unrests leading to power-sharing solutions, or former presidents being replaced by their sons. In few countries such as Guinea, free elections were organized after several decades of dictatorship.   

In this seminar, CDDRL Post-Doctoral Fellow Landry Signé will examine what makes certain countries adopt and consolidate liberal or electoral democracies when others stay authoritarian - whether competitive, hegemonic or politically closed. Signé will analyze the transformations of political regimes and democratization in the 48 Sub-Saharan African countries over the two last decades contrasting various political trajectories, comparing results between successful and failed countries, and exploring the conditions that create, maintain and sustain democracies. 

Speaker Bio:  

Landry Signé is a recipient of the 2011-2013 Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship Award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada hosted by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He is working on a project entitled “The Efficiency of the Political Responses to the Global Financial and Economic Crisis in Africa: Does the Political Regime and Economic Structure Matter?”. He completed his PhD in Political Science (2010), with the Award of Excellence, at the University of Montreal, and has been bestowed the Award for Best International PhD Dissertation of 2011 by the Center for International Studies and Research (CÉRIUM). His dissertation is entitled “Political Innovation: The Role of the International, Regional and National Actors in the Economic Development of Africa”. 

Prior to joining the CDDRL, Dr. Signé was a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center on African Studies, lecturer on Emerging African Markets: Strategies, Investments and Government Affairs at the Stanford Continuing Studies, founding president of a Canadian corporation specialized in public affairs and business development, part-time professor and lecturer in political science at Ottawa University and the University of Montreal, administrator at the United Nations Association of Canada-Greater Montréal, and president of the Political Commission of Montreal-CJ. He has worked or interned at the United Nations Department of Political Affairs, the Senate of France, the National Assembly of Cameroon, and the French Distributor, Casino Group. He studied Political Science, International Relations, Communication and Business at the University of Montreal, Lyon 3 University, Sciences Po Paris, Sandar Institute, Stanford Continuing Studies, and McGill University.

About the topic: The U.S. military has entered a period of transition. In terms of strategy, the Department of Defense is shifting away from a decade spent fighting two ground wars to a new era in which the United States hopes to spend more time preventing and deterring conflicts and preparing for future challenges. Yet at the same time, the U.S. military faces significant budget cuts in the years ahead. DOD has already released its plans for reducing the Pentagon’s base budget by $487 billion over the next decade, but the Budget Control Act of 2011 will impose an additional $500 billion in cuts on January 1 unless Congress changes the law before then. What are the strategic, military, and financial consequences of these budget cuts? Can DOD implement cuts of this magnitude and still maintain its broad global engagement strategy? Or do they pose unacceptable risks to U.S. national security objectives? This talk draws on ongoing research at the Center for a New American Security to address these questions.

About the Speaker: Nora Bensahel is Deputy Director of Studies and Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Her current areas of research include stability operations, counterinsurgency, civilian capacity for operations abroad, and coalition and alliance operations. Prior to joining CNAS, Dr. Bensahel served as a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation. She is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Security Studies Program at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, where she teaches M.A. classes and received the Alumni Leadership Council Teaching Award. She also serves on the Executive Board of Women in International Security. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. degrees from the Department of Political Science at Stanford University and her B.A. from Cornell University.

More than two decades after the cold war ended elsewhere, it continues undiminished on the Korean Peninsula. The division of the Korean nation into competing North and South Korean states and the destructive war that followed gave rise to one of the great, and still unresolved, tragedies of the twentieth century.

Published for the first time in English, Peacemaker is the memoir of Lim Dong-won, former South Korean unification minister and architect of Nobel Peace Prize winner Kim Dae-jung’s Sunshine policy toward North Korea. Lim will present a talk at Stanford in conjunction with the book’s U.S. release, highlighting major themes from it and discussing them within the context of recent developments on the peninsula.

As both witness and participant, Peacemaker traces the process of twenty years of diplomatic negotiations with North Korea, from the earliest rounds of inter-Korean talks through the historic inter-Korean summit of June 2000 and beyond. It offers a fascinating inside look into the recent history of North-South Korea relations and provides important lessons for policymakers and citizens who seek to understand and resolve the tragic—and increasingly dangerous—situation on the Korean Peninsula.

About the Speaker

Following a thirty-year career in the South Korean military, Lim Dong-won’s government service began with his tenure as ROK ambassador to Nigeria and then Australia; under the Roh Tae-woo administration, he served as chancellor of the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security and director of arms control planning. During the Kim Dae-jung administration Lim held numerous key national-level posts, including head of the National Intelligence Service and minister of unification. He currently is chairman of the Korea Peace Forum and the Hankyoreh Foundation for Reunification and Culture.

This event is made possible by the generous support from the Koret Foundation.