Showing posts with label
Center for a New American Security.
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Showing posts with label
Center for a New American Security.
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CHRISTINE PARTHEMORE of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) explores a range of potential vulnerabilities that stem from the dependence of the U.S. defense supply chains on minerals such as lithium, gallium, rhenium, tantalum, niobium and rare earths such as neodymium, samarium and dysprosium on the back of China's supply blockade of rare-earth minerals to Japan in 2010.In a CNAS report, "Elements of Security: Mitigating the Risks of U.S. Dependence on Critical Minerals", she states that minerals could affect U.S. interests through four factors: 1) an evolving energy paradigm, 2) increasing space exploration 3) accelerating seabed exploration and 4) a changing defense industrial base while policymakers were currently hampered by a lack of access to appropriate information and where hype could drive policy debates. She states that vulnerability to mineral supply disruptions could cause high cost overruns for weapons, lags in delivery of equipment, provide leverage to supplier countries and also inhibit development of clean energy technologies. She concludes that the U.S. should conduct new assessments of its defense supply chains, enhance its data collection capabilities on critical minerals as well as promote information-sharing with the private sector, integrate mineral supply vulnerabilities into its war-gaming scenarios as well as for Senate to ratify the U.N convention on the law of the sea (UNCLOS).
ROBERT KAPLAN of the Center for a New American Security analyzes the millenial history of India contrasting it with that of China and states that India would emerge as the key Eurasian pivot state because of its effect on relations between the United States and China. In a CNAS report "South Asia's Geography of Conflict", he provides an analysis of New Delhi's worldview based on the geopolitics and geographical history of South Asia cautioning that the Washington-New Delhi relationship should not fall victim to the proclivity of U.S. to poor understanding of local histories.
CHRISTINE PARTHEMORE and WILL ROGERS at the Center for a New American Security call for increased focus within the national security community on the role and strategic consequences of the availability and depletion of resources such as water, forests, cropland, fish stocks and biodiversity. In a CNAS report, Sustaining Security: How Natural Resources Influence National Security, they propose two approaches: a targeted approach based on resource conservation in a few regions such as Afghanistan and Pakistan and a more long-term multidisciplinary approach based on incorporation of resources into national security strategy.
ROBERT KAPLAN, fellow at the Center for a New American Security states that the China's advantageous hub-like geography abutting Central Asia, South-East Asia and East Asia has been mostly overlooked in any analysis of Chinese economic dynamism or strategic assertiveness and although its seaboard was as extensive as its continental interior, it faced a far tougher proposition at sea. In an op-ed in The New York Times, "The Geography of Chinese Power", he opines that a Chinese absorption of Taiwan would be considered a failure of U.S. power by the states in the Pacific and a strengthened U.S. air and sea presence in Oceania presented a compromise between resisting a Greater China at all costs and assenting to a future in which the Chinese Navy policed the first island chain.
