FSI scholars produce research aimed at creating a safer world and examing the consequences of security policies on institutions and society. They look at longstanding issues including nuclear nonproliferation and the conflicts between countries like North and South Korea. But their research also examines new and emerging areas that transcend traditional borders – the drug war in Mexico and expanding terrorism networks. FSI researchers look at the changing methods of warfare with a focus on biosecurity and nuclear risk. They tackle cybersecurity with an eye toward privacy concerns and explore the implications of new actors like hackers.
Along with the changing face of conflict, terrorism and crime, FSI researchers study food security. They tackle the global problems of hunger, poverty and environmental degradation by generating knowledge and policy-relevant solutions.
Much has happened in the three years since the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 (FMRA) was signed into law. Under the FMRA, the FAA was directed to “develop and implement operational and certification requirements for the operation of public unmanned aircraft systems in the national airspace system” by the end of 2015. In addition, the FAA was directed to “provide for the safe integration of civil unmanned aircraft systems into the national airspace system as soon as practicable, but not later than” the end of September 2015. CISAC affiliate John Villasenor gives testimony before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on Aviation Operations, Safety, and Security about key considerations of safety, innovation, economic impact and privacy when it comes to drones.
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry stood before a team of soldiers preparing to deploy to Afghanistan. Their mission would be quite different from the ones he led in the South Asian country during the height of the war.
The officers of the U.S. Army’s 3rd Bridge Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, in Fort Campbell, Ky., would soon be leading a team of about 2,000 soldiers to provide operational support and advise Afghan national forces as the U.S.-led Coalition forces withdraw and the country takes over the battle against the Taliban.
“I spoke to them about the history of the U.S. diplomatic, development and military activities in Afghanistan since 9/11,” said Eikenberry, now the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation.
Eikenberry was a military commander in Afghanistan from 2002-2003 and then again from 2005-2009. He would later serve as U.S. ambassador to Kabul from 2009 to 2011.
Col. J.B. Vowell, a former CISAC Senior Military Fellow (2012-2013), was leading the brigade, which deployed in late January for a nine-month tour. He had invited Eikenberry to speak to his troops, having met him while he was at Stanford.
The mission of his tour is to advise and protect advisors and, if necessary, support Afghan forces in extreme combat situations. Though a brigade typically has 5,000 soldiers, Vowell’s smaller, tailored team is a sharp departure from previous missions.
Former CISAC military fellow and U.S. Army Col. J.B. Vowell, left, and Ret. U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, at Fort Campbell, Ky., on Jan. 13, 2015.
“So they’ve had to think hard about not only their advisory role, but also who they will protect their own forces with, and what to do if they are called upon to support Afghan forces in an exceptionally dire situation,” said Eikenberry.
These types of operations are part of the central challenges facing the U.S. military today, Eikenberry said, adding that Vowell’s time as a senior military fellow at CISAC helped prepare him for his mission.
“The resources available at FSI help prepare officers for these challenges,” said Eikenberry, who is also an affiliate of FSI's Center on Democracy Development and the Rule of Law. “CISAC does very sophisticated studies in contemporary security problems; CDDRL does very interesting work in the development of political institutions in difficult environments. These are resources military fellows can draw upon.”
Military Fellow Program launched in 2009
When former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry returned to Stanford after his service in Washington, he and current Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter started the Preventative Defense Project at Harvard and Stanford. The project focuses on forging nongovernmental, Track II security partnerships with Russia and its neighbors, engaging China and addressing the lethal legacy of Cold War weapons of mass destruction.
Deborah Gordon, executive director of the project and manager of the military fellows program, said Perry believed that bringing in acting military officers to learn more about strategic defense policy would aid the mission to prevent future threats to global security.
“Perry started asking the various heads of the military services to allow a fellow to come to CISAC and be more broadly engaged in the university,” she said.
The Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), the umbrella organization for CISAC and other research centers, hosted its first senior military fellow in 2009. FSI now hosts five, three from the Air Force and two from the Army. Fellows go through a rigorous selection process and attend Stanford for one year to conduct research.
CISAC Senior Research Scholar and retired U.S. Army Col. Joseph Felter helped secure the Army officers for the first fellowships. He had attended Stanford as an active duty officer from 2002-2005 and has a Ph.D. in political science from the university.
“When I came back to do a War College fellowship from 08-09, the only sponsored spots were at Hoover,” he said, referring to the Hoover Institution at Stanford. “It’s a great institution but it struck me as a bit insulated from the rest of the campus. With the support of the Army War College I volunteered to take the lead on putting together a proposal.”
He persuaded the War College that there was demand for fellows and they approved the establishment of two new fellowships at CISAC. Felter, Gordon and others at CISAC knew that civilian scholars and students at the university would in turn benefit from interacting with active-duty officers for their perspective on the U.S. military around the world.
Among the first fellows were Viet Luong, who is now a one-star general and deputy commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, and Charlie Miller, who is working directly for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey as his senior advisor.
Former CISAC Military Fellow Viet Luong, now a one-star general, teaches a simulation class during his 2011-2012 fellowship.
In addition to meeting current and former government and military leaders and conducting research, fellows participate in Stanford classrooms and seminars.
Army Lt. Col. Dennis Heaney is a senior military fellow at CISAC this academic year. His research focuses on the strategic policy of the Regionally Aligned Forces (RAF), soldiers from all units of the U.S. Armed Forces that support combatant commands.
Heaney is working to delineate out the costs of altering the role of conventional forces - traditionally trained to fight against other national militaries - to fight unconventional wars that are not restricted to any particular geographic zone.
“The real dilemma is conventional Army forces are made for land warfare against other forces. They are not really cut out for irregular warfare,” Heaney said of the RAF. “When you try to do regional engagement it takes you away from your main mission. I may help you, but there is an opportunity cost. Trying to prepare for both regular and irregular warfare takes away from each one. It’s kind of a zero-sum game. So I’m trying to critique that and make recommendations.”
Heaney has been in the Army for 24 years. He started out in the infantry as an officer and then entered the Special Forces in 1997. He is likely to deploy to Afghanistan with the Special Operations Joint Task Force after he completes his fellowship.
“The biggest benefit of being a fellow at Stanford is exposure to high-level folks like Karl Eikenberry, Gen. James Mattis at Hoover, Adm. James Ellis, and former Defense Secretaries William Perry and George Schultz, as well as current Secretary of Defense Ash Carter when he was here for a short time,” Heaney said.
Carter was a visiting scholar at FSI last year, until he became the nation’s 25th secretary of defense in February.
Heaney participated in CISAC’s signature class, “International Security in a Changing World,” playing the role of military commander during simulations that are the hallmark of the class.
“One simulation was about deciding between ground or air options for a high-value target in Afghanistan,” Heaney said. “Last week we did a simulation about the Islamic State and what options exist.”
Even after they leave, military fellows maintain close ties to Stanford.
Eikenberry is slated to teach a course next term about America’s post-9/11 intervention in Afghanistan.
“I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to Skype-in to Col. Vowell’s headquarters,” he said. “I think it would be powerful for the students, after reading essay after essay about the Afghanistan intervention, to actually talk to one of our military leaders currently operating there on the ground.”
There is an effort underway to expand the military fellows program beyond FSI.
“We envision a future where military fellows can embed in the professional schools, like law and business, or in departments like engineering and political science – and even private tech companies like Google and Palantir,” Gordon said. “We want to engage Stanford and Silicon Valley in helping solve our national security problems.”
Joshua Alvarez was a CISAC Honors Student in the 2011-2012 academic year.
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Former CISAC military fellow and U.S. Army Col. J.B. Vowell, left, and Ret. U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, at Fort Campbell, Ky., on Jan. 13, 2015.
Each year the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center offers fellowship opportunities to recent graduates to further their research and engage with scholars at Stanford. Postdoctoral fellows have the opportunity to develop their dissertations for publication, present their research to the Stanford community, and participate in Center activities.
Fellows often go on to pursue teaching positions and advisory roles at top universities and research organizations around the world. Into the future, they remain engaged with the Center and continue to contribute to Shorenstein APARC publications, conferences and related activities.
Shorenstein APARC is pleased to welcome three postdoctoral fellows for the 2015-16 academic year:
Asia Health Policy Fellow
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Darika Saingam
Saingam’s research interests are public health, substance abuse, drug policy and Southeast Asia. While at Shorenstein APARC, she will research the evolution of substance-abuse control measures and related policy in Thailand.
Saingam seeks to identify potentially effective policy directions suitable for Thailand, and other developing countries in Southeast and East Asia.
“There are a lot of lessons to be learned from substance abuse policy implementations in other countries…coping and dealing with substance abuse is a complex story and cannot respond successfully with only one strategy.”
Saingam completed her doctorate in epidemiology at the Prince of Songkla University in 2012, and has served as a researcher at the University’s epidemiology unit since, as well as a researcher at the Thailand Substance Abuse Academic Network since 2014.
Shorenstein APARC Postdoctoral Fellows
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Booseung Chang
Chang’s research interests are comparative policy analysis and political institutions in East Asia, mainly South Korea and Japan. While at Shorenstein APARC, Chang will conduct research on how countries respond differently to the same external challenges, and how institutions are interpreted and applied in different ways.
His dissertation, which he seeks to build upon, is titled “The Sources of Japanese Conduct: Asymmetric Security Dependence, Role Conceptions, and the Reactive Behavior in response to U.S. Demands.” It is a qualitative comparative case study of how key U.S. allies in Asia – namely Japan and South Korea – and major powers in Europe - the United Kingdom and France responded to the U.S.-led Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War.
“East Asia is a treasure island of new theory building because some of the big challenges facing East Asia – finding a new role for Japan, denuclearization of North Korea, unification of the Korean peninsula, democratization of China and reconfiguration of its relations with the world, and development and integration of Southeast Asian countries – are truly new ones…”
Chang completed his doctorate in political science from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in 2014.
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Nico Ravanilla
Ravanilla’s research interests are political economy and governance, comparative politics and Southeast Asia. While at Shorenstein APARC, Ravanilla will research how political selection impacts governance, and evaluate possible routes for incentivizing capable and virtuous citizens to run for public office.
His project titled “Nudging Good Politicians” looks at the case of the Sangguniang Kabataan, a governing body in the Philippines comprised of elected youth leaders. Ravanilla aims to apply his research to develop and scale up programs for politicians, especially those at the onset of their careers, which would include specialized leadership training and merit-based endorsement.
“If we could design a policy that screens-in and incentivizes competent and honest citizens to run for office, would it play a catalytic role in improving the quality of the political class, and ultimately, the quality of government?”
Ravanilla is also a Southeast Asia Research Group (SEAREG) Young Southeast Asia Fellow for 2015-16. He will complete his doctorate in political science and public policy from the University of Michigan in summer 2015.
Abstract: Scholars know quite a lot about U.S. nuclear war planning from the end of World War II to the end of the Cold War. We know a great deal about how nuclear deterrence was and is supposed to work. We know much less about how officers and others understood the circumstances and consequences if deterrence had failed and these plans had been used in war. What was it like to make very specific and workable plans for a war that, in President Ronald Reagan’s words, “cannot be won and must never be fought”—but nonetheless—might have been fought? This is a problem of understanding how organizations build complex technical and logistical routines, and how people in these organizations understood and made sense of the possibility that in some circumstances, nuclear weapons would be used. How did war planners imagine the circumstances? The scenarios of what might ensue? The consequences? It is one thing to say the whole situation was a paradox, or a conundrum; it is another to understand the many meanings of this situation for those involved. Explanation hinges on how people in organizations make plans, develop scenarios, and tell stories.
About the Speaker: Lynn Eden is Associate Director for Research at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University. Eden received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, held several pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, and taught in the history department at Carnegie Mellon before coming to Stanford.
In the area of international security, Eden has focused on U.S. foreign and military policy, arms control, the social construction of science and technology, and organizational issues regarding nuclear policy and homeland security. She co-edited, with Steven E. Miller, Nuclear Arguments: Understanding the Strategic Nuclear Arms and Arms Control Debates (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). She was an editor of The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), which takes a social and cultural perspective on war and peace in U.S. history. That volume was chosen as a Main Selection of the History Book Club.
Eden's book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004; New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2004) explores how and why the U.S. government--from World War II to the present--has greatly underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons by failing to predict damage from firestorms. It shows how well-funded and highly professional organizations, by focusing on what they do well and systematically excluding what they don't, may build a poor representation of the world--a self-reinforcing fallacy that can have serious consequences, from the sinking of the Titanic to not predicting the vulnerability of the World Trade Center to burning jet fuel. Whole World on Fire won the American Sociological Association's 2004 Robert K. Merton Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology.
Eden has also written on life in small-town America. Her first book, Crisis in Watertown (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), was her college senior thesis; it was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1973. Her second book, Witness in Philadelphia, with Florence Mars (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), about the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in the summer of 1964, was a Book of the Month Club Alternate Selection.
Lynn Eden is a Senior Research Scholar Emeritus. She was a Senior Research Scholar at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation until January 2016, as well as was Associate Director for Research. Eden received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, held several pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, and taught in the history department at Carnegie Mellon before coming to Stanford.
In the area of international security, Eden has focused on U.S. foreign and military policy, arms control, the social construction of science and technology, and organizational issues regarding nuclear policy and homeland security. She co-edited, with Steven E. Miller, Nuclear Arguments: Understanding the Strategic Nuclear Arms and Arms Control Debates (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). She was an editor of The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), which takes a social and cultural perspective on war and peace in U.S. history. That volume was chosen as a Main Selection of the History Book Club.
Eden's book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004; New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2004) explores how and why the U.S. government--from World War II to the present--has greatly underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons by failing to predict damage from firestorms. It shows how well-funded and highly professional organizations, by focusing on what they do well and systematically excluding what they don't, may build a poor representation of the world--a self-reinforcing fallacy that can have serious consequences, from the sinking of the Titanic to not predicting the vulnerability of the World Trade Center to burning jet fuel. Whole World on Fire won the American Sociological Association's 2004 Robert K. Merton Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology.
Eden has also written on life in small-town America. Her first book, Crisis in Watertown (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), was her college senior thesis; it was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1973. Her second book, Witness in Philadelphia, with Florence Mars (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), about the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in the summer of 1964, was a Book of the Month Club Alternate Selection.
Abstract: The Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union lasted for much of the second half of the 20th Century. While the superpowers never engaged directly in full-scale armed combat, a nuclear arms race became the centerpiece of a doctrine of mutually assured destruction, and prompted a mass production of plutonium, and the designing, building, and testing of large numbers of nuclear weapons. In more than 50 years of operation, the Cold War battlefields created over 100 metric tons of plutonium, produced tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, oversaw more than 1000 detonations, and left behind a legacy of contaminated facilities, soils, and ground water.
The extent of long-term adverse health effects will depend on the mobility of plutonium and other actinides in the environment and on our ability to develop cost-effective scientific methods of removing or isolating actinides from the environment. Studying the complex chemistry of plutonium and the actinides in the environment is one of the most important technological challenges, and one of the greatest scientific challenges in actinide science today.
I will summarize our current understanding of actinide chemistry in the environment, and how that understanding was used in the decontamination and decommissioning of the Rocky Flats Site, where plutonium triggers for U.S. nuclear weapons were manufactured. At Rocky Flats, synchrotron radiation measurements made at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory were developed into a science-based decision-making tool that saved billions of dollars by focusing Site-directed efforts in the correct areas, and aided the most extensive cleanup in the history of Superfund legislation to finish one year ahead of schedule, ultimately resulting in billions of dollars in taxpayer savings.
About the Speaker: David L. Clark received a B.S. in chemistry in 1982 from the University of Washington, and a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry in 1986 from Indiana University. His thesis work received the American Chemical Society’s Nobel Laureate Signature Award for the best chemistry Ph.D. thesis in the United States. Clark was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford before joining Los Alamos National Laboratory as a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow in 1988. He became a Technical Staff Member in the Isotope and Nuclear Chemistry Division in 1989. Since then he has held various leadership positions at the Laboratory, including program management for nuclear weapons and Office of Science programs, and Director of the Glenn T. Seaborg Institute for Transactinium Science between 1997-2009. He has served the DOE as a technical advisor for environmental stewardship including the Rocky Flats cleanup and closure (1995-2005), closure of High Level Waste tanks at the Savannah River Site (2011), and as a technical advisor to the DOE High Level Waste Corporate Board (2009-2011). He is currently the Program Director for the National Security Education Center at Los Alamos, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Laboratory Fellow, and Leader of the Plutonium Science and Research Strategy for Los Alamos. His research interests are in the molecular and electronic structure of actinide materials, applications of synchrotron radiation to actinide science, behavior of actinide and fission products in the environment, and in the aging effects of nuclear weapons materials. He is an international authority on the chemistry and physics of plutonium, and has published over 150 peer-reviewed publications, encyclopedia and book chapters.
Actinide Chemistry and The Battlefields of the Cold War
In attempts to complement the ongoing work on police use of violence and the pacification policy conducted by the Program on Poverty and Governance for the past three years (for this specific project, PovGov analyzed an extensive database on police work - including information on homicide rates and ammunition usage - applied a questionnaire to over 5,000 police officers, and conducted several interviews and case studies with police commanders and officers), we now aim to carry out a research project that can advance the understandin
Since 2008, Rio de Janeiro has implemented a new public security policy called the “Pacification”, a police strategy with full support from the Federal government that aims to improve the overall levels of security in the city and retake areas previously dominated by criminal organizations. Based on this new model of policing - that takes an approach on community policing initiatives – “Pacifying Police Units (UPPs)” are implemented in different poor communities in the city (shanty towns).
Police use of deadly force in Brazil is extraordinary compared to the US. According to the Forum on Public Safety, the police in Brazil killed more than 11,000 people between 2009 and 2013, while law enforcement institutions in the US killed 11,000 over the past 30 years.
Abstract: Any given computer or network runs code from an enormous number of sources, including the producer of the operating system, the hardware, built-in and user-installed applications, websites, and the user herself. Computers may also run code injected by remote attackers of various sorts including autonomous viruses, individual hackers and state-backed organizations. What happens when the authors of these various software components have different objectives for the behavior of that single computer or network?
This talk will propose a simple theory that predicts which of these contestants will tend to win in different kinds of computer security contests, including the robustness of encrypted communications; the control of cloud-based and distributed computing systems; and some hypothetical future applications to the security of AI systems.
About the Speaker: Peter Eckersley is Technology Projects Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He leads a team of technologists who do both coding and policy work to strengthen Internet security, privacy, and innovation.
Peter holds a PhD in computer science and law from the University of Melbourne. His doctoral research was on digital copyright and the alternatives, including the computer security dimensions of copyright policy.
Encina Hall (2nd floor)
Peter Eckersley
Technology Projects Director
Speaker
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Due to the overwhelming response we received for this event and to our space constraints,
registration is now closed. We regret that we are unable to accommodate any more visitors.
Abstract: The explosion of an asteroid over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013 with energy 30X larger than the Hiroshima bomb was a wake-up call that asteroids of this size hit the Earth every few decades. Several large telescopes are in the works which will over the next 10 years drastically increase our ability to discover and track asteroids. A large number of these asteroids will be found to be on orbits with a high probability (great than a few percent) of hitting the Earth with energy larger than several hundred kilotons, and a few of these will actually hit the Earth. I will discuss the consequences of us actually knowing many years in advance the date and place of an asteroid impact, and how current technology makes it relatively easy to deflect an asteroid in such cases. A number of questions will be discussed such as: Who pays for gathering and analyzing the data? Who controls the data? Who is responsible for deflecting asteroids? What are the consequences (political, social, economic) on a particular area which is known to be threatened during the time period before the asteroid is deflected? The scenario of human beings deflecting an asteroid from hitting the Earth is going to happen, and is something policy makers need to be prepared for.
About the Speaker: Dr. Lu is the CEO and co-founder of the Sentinel Mission, a project of the B612 Foundation. Dr. Lu, a physicist with a PhD from Stanford, was selected for the NASA astronaut corps in 1994. He flew two Space Shuttle missions, was the first American to launch as Flight Engineer on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, and spent 206 days in space aboard the International Space Station in 2003. He is the recipient of NASA’s highest honor, the Distinguished Service Medal, and worked on Google’s Advanced Project Team.
Ed Lu
Astronaut (Fmr.); CEO and co-founder of the Sentinel Mission
Speaker
Sentinel Mission; B612 Foundation
Former CISAC military fellow and U.S. Army Col. J.B. Vowell, left, and Ret. U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, at Fort Campbell, Ky., on Jan. 13, 2015.
Former CISAC Military Fellow Viet Luong, now a one-star general, teaches a simulation class during his 2011-2012 fellowship.
