| source Georgetown (X) |
level |
department Security Studies (X) |
This is a required course for all students in the M.A. in Security Studies Program. It must be taken during the student's first semester in the program. This course provides a basic introduction to the field of security studies by examining the major theoretical approaches to the study of international relations as well as several core conceptual areas of study in the field. The course examines the causes of war, deterrence and coercion, engagement and arms control, and approaches to transnational security. Each section features a review of the main theoretical works in the field and an examination of several important empirical cases including the outbreak of the two world wars, the course and conduct of the Cold War, and an examination of the current international security environment.
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page
This course seeks to give students an understanding of the elements of grand strategy and insight into military operations that will provide a baseline of knowledge for their work toward their Masters in Security Studies and beyond. The course will explore the following issues in detail: 1. The development of national decisions to use military force, the derivation of warfighting strategy and strategic aims that follow, and the operational plan and execution of campaigns to achieve them; 2. The civil-military relationship in the development of strategy and the execution of campaigns; 3. The evolution of operational capability over time and the evolution of the relative roles air, land, and seapower; and 4. The differing demands of conventional and unconventional warfare on the conduct of operations.
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page
Credits: 3
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page
This is a required course for students in the M.A. in Security Studies Program who have a concentration in U.S. National Security Policy. It provides the intellectual foundation and conceptual tools needed to analyze contemporary U.S. national security issues. This course focuses on the role that US military forces play in guaranteeing and advancing American security. It surveys the factors that form the context for making U.S. policy decisions and addresses alternative perspectives on the choices facing policy-makers today. The first part of the course looks to three broad features of context: the domestic roots of policy, the post-1945 historical roots, and the international setting. The second part of the course looks to specific issues and to the grand strategy and broad defense policy alternatives confronting the American polity today.
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page
This course discusses the theory and practice of how "real world" decisions are made in the United States Government, with focus on the Executive Branch in the area of security policy. Three fundamental models are reviewed -- Rational Actor, Organizational, and Bureaucratic -- to understand their perspectives, principles, and interactions. The models are examined in the context of the key security-related Agencies (e.g., Deptartment of State, Department of Defense, National Security Council) . A second look at the models is then taken in the context of a series of Executive Branch decisions (e.g., weapons aquisition, NATO expansion). The final event is a mock NSC meeting, with students playing roles, to test the dynamics of the models in a simulated decision-making environment.
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page
This course analyzes the role of Congress in U.S. national security policy. It begins with a review of the constitutional, historical, and political setting, focusing in particular on the structure and powers of Congress, the dynamics of Congressional-Executive relations, and the pressures of domestic and electoral politics. Special attention is paid to longstanding, evolving conflicts between Congress and the Executive branch over war powers, foreign military sales, non-proliferation policy, base closures, defense reorganization, and arms control. The course concludes with an examination of the role of Congress in the formation and implementation of U.S. national security policy in the contemporary era and its role in addressing current and emerging U.S. national security challenges.
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page
The goal of this course is to provide students with a thorough understanding of the strategic, political, legal, and organizational challenges associated with the defense of the U.S. homeland, the efforts that are under way to meet these challenges, and possible policy options. The course starts by examining the range of potential threats to the U.S. homeland, focusing on potential terrorist acts. The course then examines strategies and means for addressing these threats, including both military and non-military options. The course goes on to analyze organizational issues and impediments to effective policy coordination. Finally, the course addresses the implications of homeland security challenges and policies for constitutional rights, legal protections, and civil liberties.
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page
Rogue. Outlaw. Pariah. Such are the names commonly assigned a diverse group of countries--including Iran, North Korea, Burma, and Zimbabwe--that violate international norms on terrorism, weapons proliferation, or human rights. The course focuses on the development of effective strategies to induce these diplomatically isolated states to comply with their international obligations. It critically explores the nexus between proliferation and terrorism, and the persisting tension in U.S. policy between the competing objectives of changing the behavior of rogue states and changing their ruling regimes. As historical background, containment strategies adopted by the United States toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War are examined, as is the rise of the post-Cold War ârogue stateâ threat. The course utilizes the qualitative methodology of âtarget-state analysisâ to assess a stateâs âworldviewâ and âstrategic personalityâ and then translate general concepts of containment and engagement into strategies tailored to the specific realities within the state. Case studies include U.S. policies toward Iraq, Libya, North Korea, and Iran.
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page
Credits: 3
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page
This course examines the analytic challenges associated with planning U.S. military forces. It focuses in particular on campaign analysis dynamic assessment of how opposing military forces might engage each other as a tool for understanding the strengths and weaknesses of U.S. military forces and different force structure options. The course begins with an examination of strategic nuclear forces, looking at how these forces were configured during the Cold War and how strategic nuclear planning issues have changed since the end of the Cold War. The course then undertakes a detailed examination of conventional forces, analyzing ground forces, air forces, naval forces, and operations other than war in turn. The overarching goal is to provides students with analytic tools and substantive expertise that will enable them to develop rational, effective plans for future U.S. military forces.
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page
This course provides instruction in methods of analysis that are widely used in conducting studies on defense strategy and forces. It covers strategic planning methods for nuclear and conventional forces, plus methods in systems analysis and operations research that are used for analyzing defense programs and budgets. The material will be taught at a level capable of being understood by political science students and others not familiar with these fields. Students will learn how to employ these techniques in their own research in graduate school and in professional jobs afterward.
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page
This course examines the causes, conduct, and effects of limited wars and low-intensity conflicts. Limited wars are wars that are limited in the aims of and/or in the means utilized by the belligerents. Low-intensity conflicts include insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, ethnic and tribal conflicts, civil wars, rescue operations, armed interventions, peace operations, terrorism and armed counter-terrorism operations, and counter-drug operations. This course examines the theory and practice of limited wars and low-intensity conflicts, the causes and conduct of these conflicts, the ways these conflicts have evolved over time, and options for conflict prevention and conflict resolution. This course focuses in particular on the U.S. experience in low-intensity conflicts, including the U.S. war in Vietnam, the ongoing war on terrorism, and the prospects for limited, high-technology conflicts in the future.
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page
Credits: 3
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page
Credits: 3
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page
This course will examine the role of intelligence in the formulation and implementation of national security policy within the U.S. Government. We will begin by looking at how the intelligence function is organized and carried out within the government, the tradecraft and "ethos" of intelligence analysts, and their relationship with policymakers in the Executive branch and in Congress. We will then examine the issues and concerns that frequently arise in the course of these relationships, using a series of historical case studies to illustrate the sorts of problems that have arisen and how they have been dealt with by policymakers and analysts alike. At the end of the semester, we will have a classroom exercise where students assume the roles of policymakers and intelligence analysts and work through a hypothetical case. The last session of the course will be devoted to a discussion of how the relationship between policymaker and intelligence analyst might be improved.
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page
This course examines the U.S. laws and policies governing the conduct of intelligence activities and the relationship between national security and individual rights. It explores the principal policy questions raised by the conduct of intelligence activities in a democratic society. The first half of the course examines the legal authorities for intelligence activities and the respective powers of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. In the second half, the course focuses on the impact of intelligence activities on individual rights in specific contexts, such as covert activities, combating terrorism, conducting espionage investigations, and protecting classified information.
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page
This course will examine the evolution of US Intelligence Community analysis from its origins in the National Security Act of 1947 to the Bush Administration in 2003. There are no prerequisites. Students will assess the performance of IC analysis on The Soviet Strategic Threat, the Soviet Economy, the 1962 Cuban Missile Threat, Viet Nam, the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars, Afghanistan, the collapse of Communism, German Unification, the Balkans, International Terrorism, China, North Korea, and contemporary Iraq (presence of WMD, linkage to Al Qaeda). Readings and class discussions will also focus indirectly on structure and organization of analytic programs, management challenges, tradecraft, and on IC relations with policymakers and the Congress how analysis gets done, is delivered, and is used. Students will participate in two scenario-based exercises on the production of national intelligence estimates and on policymakers' use of intelligence analysis.
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page
Credits: 3
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page
Credits: 3
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page
This course examines the use of airpower as a strategic instrument, exploring leading theories from the 1920s to the present regarding how airpower can and should be employed to achieve national policy objectives, and considering a series of key historical cases of the application of airpower in crises and military campaigns ranging from the Second World War to Kosovo and Afghanistan. It will focus heavily on the problems of strategic deterrence and compellence using airpower and other military force, including not only "strategic bombing" per se but also other approaches to the coercive use of airpower. Considerable attention will be devoted to the legal and moral dimensions of air warfare throughout the course, and it will conclude with a discussion of the political and technological trends that may shape the evolution of air and space power over the next generation.
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page
Credits: 3
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page
This is a required course for students in the M.A. in Security Studies Program who have a concentration in International Security. It is also suitable for non-specialists who are interested in a survey of international security issues. This course examines the full array of military and non-military factors that influences international security problems, paying particular attention to the special nature of security problems in the developing world. The first section of the course analyzes the forces--political, economic, cultural, military technological, demographic, and environmental--that shape security problems, and it provides a historical overview of the changing security landscape. The second part examines security problems--past, present, and emerging--on a region-by-region basis, looking at Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. The final section of the course assesses current trends and the prospects for stability and security in the international system.
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page
This course examines national security policies of countries in a comparative perspective with a view towards understanding why military organization and civil-military relations differ among states and how these differences affect military policy and effectiveness. The global security environment has undergone two major recent changes in the form of the end of the Cold War and the attacks on the World Trade Center. However, for many states in the developing world security concerns have remained relatively unchanged over longer periods of time. The course examines the various inputs to the making of defense policy such as security threats, culture, institutions, civil-military relations, alliances, and technology; evaluates different defense policies against the objectives. The course is organized thematically and divided into five parts: the sources of defense policy, the making of defense policy, defense capabilities, case studies of military effectiveness, and future trends. Empirically, the course will study in varying degrees of depth the defense policies of pivotal states in various regions of the world.
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page
This course analyzes intelligence policies and practices from a broad comparative perspective, examining intelligence organizations and activities in the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, Canada, Japan, Israel, and other countries. Key issues include: the formation of intelligence requirements, different styles of intelligence collection and analysis, the use of technology, the use of covert operations, and interactions between intelligence and policymaking communities. Special attention is given to the challenges of conducting intelligence in the information-rich environment of the 21st century and the challenges of multilateral cooperation in intelligence matters.
Score: 10.779573 Details | Listing | Web page