Given the political polarization and the fraught and fragile nature of current civil-military relations in the United States, I determined to make this critical dynamic a major renewed concentration. I organized forums that explored the historical and current status of U.S. civil-military relations, to provide context and understanding of the responsibilities and the risks of fracturing the relationship.

With the many dangerous developments of the Trump administration:

Controversial funding of the Southern border wall;

Resignation of Secretary of Defense General James Mattis;

Abandonment of our Kurdish allies;

Generals Esper and Milley’s actions in Lafayette Square and before St. John’s Church;

Dismissal of the Captain of the USS Roosevelt over a COVID breakout;

Presidential pardon of a Navy SEAL accused of war crimes;

Deployment of military forces in Portland and other domestic U.S. cities; the dismissal of General Espy;

Rash of firings at the Pentagon;

And then the unprecedented, dangerous chaos of the attempted coup on January 6th — and the ongoing startling revelations of the January 6th commission regarding the actions of militias — the health of the U.S. civil-military relationship has rarely been more important to restore and secure our democracy.

I worked with professional ALLIES liaison veterans, and new allies including:

• Professor Damon Coletta of USAFA, Scowcroft Professor of Political Science;

• Anne Gibbon, who oversaw the USNA ALLIES chapter during her time as the Associate Director of the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership, and led the ALLIES JRP to Uganda in honor of the memory of Tufts alumnus, Captain Ben Sklaver;

• Dr. James Golby, civil-military scholar and former United States Military Academy, West Point’s ALLIES academic liaison;

• Lucas Kello, an Associate Professor at Oxford, an expert on cyber and Governance, author of the Virtual Weapon, and the Founding Director of the Oxford Centre for Technology and Global Affairs;

• Gregg Nakano, a Fletcher School graduate, acknowledged and honored by the Institute on the tenth anniversary of ALLIES as the “ramrod and intellectual force” behind the maturation and growth of ALLIES;

• Ret. Maj. Benjamin Paganelli, a former Professor of Political Science at the United States Air Force, who as Academic adviser to USAFA’s ALLIES chapter, led the 2011 ALLIES Joint Research Project to Rwanda; and

• Michael Peznola, the Chief of Staff and the Dean of Administration at the National War College.

Here was my introduction to our first panel, hosted by the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin on October 27th.

Our second panel was held on December 1st, in the aftermath of our fraught election. The information and registration for the original forum can be found here. The forum was slightly revised when Risa Brooks was unable to participate. Here is the recording.

Our moderator Jim Golby wrote this editorial about the controversial nomination of Army General Lloyd Austin to become the Secretary of Defense.

One consequence of the Clements forums is increased interest in ALLIES, from individuals from University of Texas Austin, the Naval War College and the University of Rhode Island.

I want to coalesce the community we have created, seventeen years after the inception of ALLIES. A significant constituency for this initiative are the student alumni of ALLIES. I reconnected with Alex Zerden, my Tufts student from one of the first ALLIES cohorts in the inaugural ALLIES JRP to Jordan. He recently returned from his position as a Treasury attaché at the US Embassy in Kabul, where his military counterpart had also been an ALLIES student from West Point.

I continue my close friendships with both former ALLIES students and mentors. Shanzhi Thia, a Tufts grad and Naval Officer in the Singapore Navy, has just joined Convisero as a mentor. ALLIES has great potential internationally; two mentors have stayed at my Brookline home, including USAFA’s Ben Paganelli — whose son is now attending Boston University and I am available to him as a mentor — and USNA’s Anne Gibbon.

There are many, including: Marine Corps Captain Jesse Sloman, who recently spoke for the Institute on his path from ALLIES into a career in security; Tomo Takaki; Michelle Cerna, a doctoral candidate in Political Science at the George Washington University, with a research focus on security studies and civil-military relations; Roland Gillah, an Officer with the Mercy Corps Humanitarian Analysis Team in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Aparna Ramadan, a Senior Consultant with Deloitte, and formerly a Program Specialist on Applied Conflict Research with the United States Institute for Peace.

Some ALLIES are alumni who are quite senior such as:
J. Erik Hartel, Chief, Signal Intelligence Branch at The United States Army Space and Missile Defense Command and Gabriel Koehler-Derrick, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science at NYU Abu Dhabi., who previously taught in the Social Sciences Department at the United States Military Academy and worked in the Combating Terrorism Center.

Some are very recent including:
William Beckham, First Lieutenant, 1st Cavalry Division’s 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team in Fort Hood, TX and James Randaccio, 2nd Lieutenant, United States Marine Corps.

By serendipity, we discovered that my next door neighbor, Heather Ichord, was on the Annapolis crew team with Anne. Heather has joined the Defense Innovation Unit, under their human systems focus, and is a Presidential Leadership Scholar. She has just finished her mid-career MPA at Harvard Kennedy School, the application for which I was pleased to provide a recommendation.

One wonderful ALLIES alum, Francis Dixon, who attended the first Clements panel, wrote me:

I find its topic very timely and something I have spent a lot of time thinking about. After 10 years in the US Air Force I transferred into the Reserves in 2016 and went to Harvard Business School for an MBA. Two years out I am now working for a consulting firm and continue to serve in the Reserves as a Lieutenant Colonel in the USAF and the Squadron Commander of a F-22 Maintenance unit at Langley AFB in Virginia.

As I navigate the space of a citizen-airman and a Commander who is entrusted to take and to issue lawful orders, I find myself planning different scenarios and what the oath "to support and defend the constitution of the United States" really mean, especially when there seems to be increasingly concerning issues around what are, and are not, facts and truth.

In any potential military situation, my unit is on the line (albeit far down the list) to respond to such crises, and I am thankful for the outstanding education I received at Tufts and in EPIIC to learn to think critically about these issues and to read broadly to better understand how I might play my small part in history with the thoughtfulness and dignity which is required.

Frances was responsible for convincing the US Air Force to deploy its drones over Haiti and the Dominican Republic to monitor allegations of child kidnappings.

I made wonderful friends through this program. One in particular, whose passing I mourn, is Judge Juan Guzman. He invited our ALLIES contingent to Santiago, Chile, to create the first human rights curriculum for the militarized carabineros, whose service has been deeply implicated in the torture and disappearances of dissidents and others of the Pinochet regime.

Indo-Pacific ALLIES

I continue to work with wonderful Gregg Nakano, who has been instrumental in helping ALLIES to consider a distinctive paradigm shift. (In our past collaboration for our Global Health and Security EPIIC year, he delivered this important address: “Violence: A Global Public Health Challenge From Sabers to Scalpels: Transforming the Military Industrial Complex into the Human Security.”)

Working with the Pacific Command, he has been involved in broadening the definition of security to its fullest dimensions. Pacific ALLIES is preparing students, cadets and midshipmen for the leadership challenges associated with climate adaptation, global health and human security.

The ongoing work of ALLIES in the Pacific region includes an assessment of the impact of climate change and other environmental concerns, in recognition of the military’s critical role in civil-military relations through its formidable post-disaster crisis response capability, as in the earthquake in Haiti, the Fukushima earthquake, and the 2004 tsunami.

The Marshall Islands were notoriously used for extensive nuclear testing until the 1960s, and remain a premiere missile test site and key military base for the US. As part of our Trebuchet Pugwash-related efforts we will be exploring the ongoing impact of the archipelago’s nuclear legacy.

Liechtenstein Institute for Strategic Development (LISD) | ALLIES Research

Marcy Murninghan, an expert on corporate social responsibility and disaster response was my Institute INSPIRE Fellow during the 2008 EPIIC “Global Poverty and Inequality” year. Her research centers around her vision for integrating civilian, corporate, and military disaster response systems to address the immediate challenges posed by climate change

Both Gregg and Marcy are LEAP Fellows and work with Peter Droege, another former Institute INSPIRE Fellow, and his Liechtenstein Institute for Strategic Development to develop their initiatives and networks. The Northeastern Global Resilience Institute, directed by Stephen Flynn, a past EPIIC panelist is also engaged.

Pugwash-Inspired ALLIES Chapters

As a member of the ISYP Advisory Board I will infuse Pugwash-inspired dimensions at the ALLIES chapters of the military academies, with the mentorship of military and intelligence professionals.

At my instigation USAFA’s Scowcroft Professor Damon Coletta, and Associate Director at USAFA's Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense Studies, brought the Air Force Academy back to ALLIES after a sustained absence.

He participated as a panelist in ALLIES’ 7th Intellectual Roundtable, “Securing the Final Frontier: The 21st Century Space Race.” Professor Coletta’s most recent book Courting Science: Securing the Foundation for a Second American Century, is a topic of direct importance for this initiative. Coletta was a visiting scientist at the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and edits the peer-reviewed electronic journal Space & Defense. He also represents the Department of Political Science for USAFA’s Nuclear Minor, a course sequence offered jointly with the Department of Physics in accordance with the Air Force Chief of Staff’s Flight Plan for the Air Force Nuclear Enterprise.

At the Naval Academy at Annapolis, I will work with former Superintendent, Vice Admiral Walter Carter to pursue such an integration. Another overture to pursue is a collaboration between West Point and Bard College’s Center for the Study of the Drone.

At Harvard, I have significant inroads at the Belfer Center for Science and Technology where Steve Miller, Matt Bunn and Francesca Giovanni.are staunch friends and allies.

I also have support from Brigadier General Kevin Ryan and Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, both former Directors of the Intelligence Project. Here, our approach is a hybrid of concern with nuclear proliferation, disruptive technology and the environment, and an emphasis on conflict resolution. It is a wonderful friendship. I was awarded the Belfer Center’s Elbe Award by Kevin upon my retirement for “Thirty Years of Dedication and Leadership,” and “the courage to reach across dangerous divides.”

Engendering A Strategic Narrative

With Captain Wayne Porter, one of my former Institute’s INSPIRE Fellows and the first Chair of Complexity and Systemic Strategy at Monterey Naval Postgraduate School, ALLIES had explored his “Mr. Y,” approach in 2012, focused on the development of a new strategic narrative for the United States, "which requires that we invest more in education, infrastructure, environmentally sustainable prosperity and the tools of effective global engagement. “Mr. Y” was an updated response to the containment doctrine exemplified by “Mr. X,” George Kennan, the dominant narrative during the Cold War. Its urgency is all the more apparent given the lack of preparedness for the recruitment of a new generation of soldiers without waiver, due in part to a lack of education, health issues, addiction and criminal convictions. Only 23% of Americans ages 17-24 are qualified to serve without a waiver to join, down from 29% in recent years, and only 9% of those young Americans eligible to serve in the military had any inclination to do so. This calls into question the viability of an all-volunteer army.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, who is cited in the above article, came to present at ALLIES at Tufts in 2014, one of a long list of distinguished military, civilian and security experts, including Michele Flournoy. What was interesting to external observers of ALLIES was the high degree of women involved in our initiatives. (When I was an advisor to the Madeleine Albright Institute at Wellesley College, I worked with students from the ALLIES chapter.)

Now, with the resurgence of serious, “hard” security concerns, with Russian military aggression in Ukraine, the expansion of NATO, increased tension on the Korean peninsula, and active hostilities with Iran, we need to urgently integrate and consider evolving conceptions of security. One of our aspirations through ALLIES chapters has been to stimulate thinking about the creation of what I have called a “Mr. Z” strategy.

One controversial speaker was Colonel Rod Paschall, Former Commander of the DELTA Force from 1980-82,

With “Conflict in the 21st Century,” the 27th Annual Norris and Margery Bendetson EPIIC International Symposium, we merged ALLIES concerns with those of EPIIC. The following panels will provide details of what we were concerned with:

• Power Transitions in the 21st Century, ft. Andrew J. Bacevich, Ariel Levite, Gwyn Prins, Zhang Qingmin, and Sergey Zuev

• The Present and Future Battlefield: Cyberwarfare, Neuroscience and Robotics, ft. Braden Allenby, Ariel Levite, William C. Martel, Jonathan D. Moreno, and Capt. Wayne Porter (US Navy).

• “Mr. Y”: US National Strategic Policy Directions, ft. Antonia Chayes, Lt. General Dirk Jameson (USAF, ret), Col. Mark “Puck” Mykleby (US Marines, ret.), and Capt. Wayne Porter (US Navy)

• Eye to Eye, Drone to Drone: The (De)Personalization of Warfare, ft. Ronald Arkin, Ami Ayalon, Lt. General Dirk Jameson (USAF, ret), William Ostlund (US Army), Col. Ferdinand Safari, Susannah Sirkin, and Wendell Wallach