Migration would seem to one of the least promising areas for global governance, but factors might emerge out of left field in the period to 2030 that could improve the prospects.

Global governance of migration seems far off.  Trends are hard to determine, with flows driven by economic, demographic, security, climate-related and political push and pull factors.  Adverse consequences of migration are borne unevenly, and concerns about migration often involve dyads or groupings of sending and receiving countries, often with little national incentives to widen their issues to broader forums.  National approaches have tended to dominate, with states eager to protect their prerogatives, less than completely willing to admit deficiencies in enforcement or demand for labor for their informal economies.  Weak countries that incur adverse consequences have little clout with more powerful sending or receiving countries.  Countries that might lead global governance issues would have to contend with “glass house” issues before trying to induce others to collective action.  If all this were not enough, adverse consequences and the net outcome of costs and benefits are notoriously hard to measure.  For example, erosion of social cohesion as a consequence of migration is hard to weigh against benefits of labor migration.  It is unclear who will be the future advocates of global governance of migration, if there are any.  It may be the closest we collectively get is a spaghetti-like network of bilateral commitments, conventions on standards, and side deals.

Global governance perhaps has come farthest for human trafficking, but with its criminal dimension, this is only partially a migration issue.  Human trafficking may be unique in the traction it gets because of shared concern or compassion for victims.

All that said, some form of global governance of migration would be rational for nation-states, because of the prospect for overall improvement in economic performance, and cross-cutting human rights.  Perhaps the strongest argument is that migration shocks will inevitably come, and they could be cross-regional or global in scope.  Some form or efforts are global governance could provide a rehearsal stage for cooperation in times of migration shock. Shocks of sufficient magnitude could even kick global governance of migration forward, with the right set of actors involved.

One big open question concerns the sources of future advocacy for global governance of migration.  Who will the strongest advocates be and will they have some common backgrounds?  Of nation-states do not champion improved governance of migration, will others?

There could be an intersection with the trend in which there are many more cosmopolitans globally, with fewer and weaker attachments to nation-states?  Globally, we could see more citizenship a la carte,including dual citizenship, with extensive freedom of action for this special kind of migrant.  Some of these cosmopolitans will primarily have economic motivations and incentives.  They will have strong preferences for lifestyle residences, flexible citizenship, and venue shopping for attractive public finance and investment arrangements.  However, there also will normative cosmopolitans, with sophisticated insider critiques of both the West and of emerging economies, with nuanced interpretation of home countries challenges, including challenges and human costs of unregulated migration. The counter argument is that successful advocates of global migration would need strong roots in the domestic politics of major player countries to work.  Normative cosmopolitans would likely not, under today’s circumstances at least.

Robert O. is one of the Research Directors in the National Intelligence Council’s Strategic Futures Group, with a portfolio covering governance, democratization, and migration.

Between now and 2030, urban conglomerations will likely continue to be magnets for migration, including continued internal rural-to-urban migration in the developing world, urban-to-urban migration of poor people between neighboring countries, and migration of people to cities in Europe, and in strong emerging economies. Migration could easily add to the stresses on urban governance that already exist.  Mega-cities will cover hundreds of square miles, with increasing complex mixing of socio-economic classes in concentric circles from city nuclei to vast urban peripheries. A few key questions come to mind on the intersection of urban growth and politics, and all three involve migrants.

Is the supply of institutions and leaders for urban governance likely to meet the demand?  Demand for sound urban governance is likely to be intense.  There will be a premium on problem-solving for resource management, including food and water security, environmental standards, and working across seams in law enforcement because of their critical importance to the welfare of urban dwellers, including many migrants.

Under the right circumstances, people in mega-cities are likely to take the initiative to supply sound urban governance. Many examples already exist of grass-roots innovation and creativity; in fact, within the territories of almost-failed states, the city and local governance structures are often the best organized and most competent.

However, the ability of cities to take such initiatives will likely be dependent on how they are able to navigate public finance and their abilities to draw revenues from economic activities in cities and not losing those revenues to higher levels of government or to patronage.   Cities will seek effective workarounds to tap the revenues from large informal economies in cities, and using those revenues to improve services.  This is bound to involve accounting for and incorporating large numbers of internal or international migrants, without challenging their presence or residency.  Geo-demographic mapping—facilitated by ICT, could enable good characterizations of urban residents and neighborhoods.  Will city residents come to have a sense of agency that catalyzes problem-solving or will survival instincts dominate?

Are people likely to work across jurisdictions or borders to improve urban governance?  Policy coherence or coordination among cities within a country could give them leverage against central governments. In some cases, people from cities in adjoining countries could have more in common than with co-citizens from elsewhere in their respective countries, potentially mediated by migrants with ties to several countries. Moreover, shared interests between urban actors and international actors, such as NGOs, could empower urban areas and motivate actions to improve problem-solving in mega-cities. While sovereignty barriers between countries could prevent coordinated actions or cross-learning, barriers could be overcome by the public demand for problem-solving and the cross-nation affinities of many urban-dwellers.  Will workarounds prevail?

Will urban migrant concentrations act as incubators for political change or emergence of political entrepreneurs? Concentrations of migrants could catalyze social mobilization among urban residents, including creative ways to harness informal economies or foster political decentralization. Rural to urban migration also has played a role in revolutions in places as historically diverse as 1848 Europe, 1978/79 Iran, and the 2011 Arab Awakening.  People in urban areas and their vast urban peripheries could have more exposure to economic inequalities, more incentive to shake the system, and more access to new ideas than their co-citizens. The presence of large numbers of migrants could facilitate contagion of ideas across cities in unexpected ways, including ideas for improved governance.  Can social and political mobilization occur in ways that avoid blaming migrants?

Robert O. is one of the Research Directors in the National Intelligence Council’s Strategic Futures Group, with a portfolio covering governance, democratization, and migration.

The potential for persistent instability in North Africa, the Levant, and South Asia clearly has high stakes for Western Europe, for lots of reasons, but foremost because of the prospect for increased migration from Muslim-majority countries.  This trend will likely reshape Western European society and politics.

With low projected economic growth, Western Europe would have many challenges with current levels of immigrant flows and immigrant residents.  Assuming that Western European fertility remains at sub-replacement levels, countries can expect to experience a rapid shift in ethnic composition, particularly around urban areas. While Western Europe’s future of demographic aging and declines in its working-age population should enhance immigrants’ job opportunities, labor market and workplace policies could continue to dampen formal-sector job growth. When coupled with job discrimination and educational disadvantage, these factors will confine many immigrants to low-status, low-wage jobs, and result in deepening societal cleavages.

• The growing presence of Muslim communities in Western European countries has already triggered contentious debate over policies affecting human rights, group rights, education, women’s rights, freedom of expression, and the relationship between the state and religion.
• Despite a sizable stratum of integrated Muslims across Western Europe, a subset will increasingly identify with Muslim communities that are relatively closed to outsiders, valuing their separation as distinct communities, oriented toward Muslim-specific rights and privileges, with some driven by a sense of alienation, grievance and injustice.
• It may be that Western European governments, and political systems, could meet with limited success in managing integration of resident Muslims. Part of the challenge will likely be a surplus of policy goals—from mitigating radicalization to engendering adoption of shared values of tolerance and individual human rights, to respecting majority community values, and respecting minority community values. The skill and subtlety required to reconcile these diverse goals and implement programs with broad public support across multiple jurisdictions of government could well be beyond the capacity of most Western European states and their political systems.

Debates over Muslim-related social policies are almost certain to influence the structure and texture of the European political environment.  Even without increased levels of migration, Western Europeans face wrenching tasks of rewriting of social contracts and adaptation of political systems.  The presence of large Muslim minorities in Western Europe, as voters and as non-voting residents, will give these tasks a normative dimension that will hard to avoid.  It is a massive open question whether Europe’s rich and complex history of reconciling religion and the state will be a net hindrance or a net asset.

Robert O. is one of the Research Directors in the National Intelligence Council’s Strategic Futures Group, with a portfolio covering governance, democratization, and migration.

By Stephen Peter Rosen

Natural scientists study complex systems by breaking them down into simpler parts before analyzing them.  By holding some factors constant, we think we can isolate the impact of changes in other factors.  This method works in many cases, but not for strategy.  The proliferation of nuclear weapons and of precision strike weapons are parts that form a whole that must be studied as such.

First, the presence of nuclear weapons in a hostile country will affect operations involving non-nuclear precision strike weapons, even if the nuclear weapons are never detonated.  Consider the problem of command and control.  Attacking the command and control systems of an enemy with precision weapons has become a routine part of war.  Given the fact that nuclear weapons will be deployed on dual capable missiles, what will happen when the command and control system controlling nuclear weapons may be affected by attacks on networks controlling non-nuclear systems?  Will the attacker be able to distinguish, reliably and in time of war, between the command networks for nuclear weapons and those for non-nuclear weapons, particularly if the adversary tries to hide his nuclear armed platforms among his non-nuclear armed platforms?  Will the attacker want to cut the links between national command authorities and the commanders controlling nuclear weapons, or will the attacker be self-deterred by the prospect of creating a situation in which nuclear weapons cannot be controlled by the political leaders of a hostile country? If the attacker is not so deterred, what will the battlefield dynamic be like when both sides have deployed nuclear weapons that are no longer under the control of the national command authority?

Second, nuclear weapons deployed on dual capable delivery vehicles will affect maneuver forces on land and at sea.  Mobile nuclear armed systems may conceal themselves to avoid becoming the target of precision strikes.  Hostile countries may want to conduct military operations in areas that may contain deployed, concealed nuclear weapons delivery systems, but they may not wish inadvertently to destroy enemy nuclear weapons and put the enemy in a “use them or lose them” position.  Will areas be denied to maneuver forces because casino online of the fear of inadvertent escalation?  Or will conventional warfare inadvertently threaten or casino online destroy enemy nuclear weapons?

Third, will the networks of networks supporting longer range precision strike weapons operate in an environment in which even one nuclear weapon has been detonated, deliberately or by accident? The first order assessment is “no, they will not.”  What will warfare look like when the United States and its adversary both lose their intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance systems and their command and control links in the theater, and perhaps globally?  Will the United States have an advantage because our military has a practice of devolving operational responsibilities to lower levels of command than is found in other militaries?  Or is the United States more dependent on modern communications than its adversaries?  If so, will it be more crippled than its enemy by nuclear detonations that disrupt those communications?

The United States government, civilian and military, appears to be operating on several problematic assumptions in this area. First, we appear to assume that nuclear proliferation will not proceed further.  Second, if it does, the effects will be confined to nuclear arms competitions, for example, between Iran and Saudi Arabia.  While that is not a happy outcome, the consequences will be limited because “no one will use nuclear weapons.” Third, implicitly, the United States government is acting as if nuclear weapons do not matter as much as other military requirements.  We are cutting our spending on nuclear weapons, and on capabilities that mitigate the consequences of nuclear weapons use.  A study of the strategic future that includes the proliferation of both nuclear weapons and precision strike weapons suggests that the United States government may wish to revisit those assumptions.

Stephen Peter Rosen is Senior Counselor at the Long Term Strategy Group and the Beton Michael Kaneb Professor of National Security and Military Affairs at Harvard University.

By BG William C. Hix, US Army

Today’s headlines provide the prologue to a broad range of emerging challenges in an increasingly unpredictable and complex security environment, even as impending budget shortfalls promise to constrain our resources to respond.  The increased speed, quantity, and reach of human interactions, along with potential adversaries’ greater access to lethal capabilities, are driving the likelihood of instability and disorder in ways that blur the distinctions of past conflicts.  A Syrian regime held up by an increasingly shaky Shi’a-Alawite alliance, a nuclear armed North Korean state teetering on the verge of collapse, the increasing influence of transnational criminal organizations, and under-governed spaces such as post-Qaddafi Libya reflect this complexity and illustrate the wide variety of existing and emerging challenges to US national interests.  Recent events, along with China’s growing economic and military power tied to its own goals and ambitions, and the increasing risk of nuclear weapons proliferation in East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East make clear that the United States must remain engaged and prepared for a wide range of challenges.

Solving these security challenges will not be accomplished without human interaction on the ground.  Historically, it has been ground forces that have been required to operate in difficult environments, made complex by the unpredictability of human interaction.  Looking to 2030 this complexity will only increase, driven by globalization, increased access to information, and transparency, resulting in a remarkable diffusion of power and the proliferation of technology to increasingly diverse groups.  The character of conflict is likely to change as a result of these factors. Accordingly, two critical issues will dominate ground force operations in Asia and the Middle East:  nuclear proliferation and the diffusion of anti-access capabilities.

Dealing with nuclear proliferation issues that will casino online likely dominate the world stage in 2030 is essential.  Based on stated objectives and trends, the risk of nuclear proliferation in East Asia, South Asia or the Middle East cannot be ignored.  Still other nuclear states may not be able to keep their weapons out of the hands of a wide variety of non-state actors.  A Stanford database on nuclear smuggling documents some 850 incidents in the past decade, including weapons grade plutonium smuggled out of the former Soviet Union.  Nuclear related arrests have been made in Armenia and Georgia.  In the coming decades, with thousands of nuclear facilities spread throughout the world and not all nations maintaining high standards of security, it is necessary to plan These Herbal Detox mood enhancers are designed to help people cope with everyday stress. for the possibility of lapses at some of these facilities. As a matter of sound risk mitigation or crisis response, if called upon US Army forces will play a key role in working with other joint capabilities to quickly locate, online casino track, seize, secure, and deal with the consequences of nuclear proliferation.

As the country moves toward 2030, the US military will confront significant challenges to access that it hasn’t encountered since World War II.  Breakthroughs in precision technology will make gaining and maintaining access one the key functions of ground forces in the future.  More precise missiles, aircraft, and unmanned aircraft are the technological backbone of future access challenges. Many of these precision capabilities are also developed as online casino retrofit kits, upgrading older systems.  Intercontinental ballistic missiles with an accuracy of 100 meters will be within reach of nations and non-state actors alike thanks to advancements in global mapping, measurement devices (gyros and lasers), global positioning systems, and computing power.  The Chinese 400-meter WS-2 multiple rocket launchers and the Russian Yakhont cruise missile with a 300-kilometer range are just two examples of weapons likely to be widely proliferated by 2030. Increasingly, capabilities such as GPS jamming and laser countermeasures are exacerbating the access challenge. Enemies with precision mortars, artillery, rockets, missiles, and cyber tools can and will cover our likely entry points. Recognizing these challenges, the United States is developing operational approaches and capabilities to address these threats and maintain our competitive advantage over known and potential adversaries. These include off set entry operations and the application of US asymmetric advantages to counter or destroy hostile precision strike.

Military forces must ultimately be prepared to fight and win wars.  Indeed, it this capacity to respond decisively that is vital to deterring wars in the first place.   Certainly, ground forces have particular value in shaping the environment before a crisis even erupts and preventing conflict. One common denominator of most nations in Asia and the Middle East is the prominence of their ground forces. Army conventional and special operations forces are uniquely suited to assist Asian and Middle Eastern countries build the capacity to handle their own problems. Replicating and increasing past successes in this area will be all the more important given an unpredictable and complex future operating environment. Concurrently, we continue to study and attend to emerging challenges, ensuring we stand ready to meet whatever tests lie ahead.

Brigadier General William C. Hix is Director, Concept Development and Learning, Army Capabilities Integration Center, US Army Training and Doctrine Command.

By Elbridge Colby

A quarter century ago, nuclear weapons were central to US military planning – yet today they are largely consigned to the background.  How important will they be a quarter century from now?

Many argue that the salience of nuclear weapons in military planning will continue to decline.  These observers point to the international opprobrium that constrains the employment or brandishing of such weapons, typified by the apparent growth of a “taboo” or “tradition of non-use,” as well as the more practical difficulties of using nuclear weapons in a rational and controlled fashion.  To these observers, assuming some degree of prudent statesmanship and good faith among the major powers, nuclear weapons will continue to recede in relevance.  Nuclear forces may well exist in the 2030s, but they will provide a basically existential deterrent, hardly impinging on the real world concerns of statesmen and military planners except as hazardous material to be properly accounted for.

But is this prediction of continuity correct?  Are nuclear weapons likely to be as marginal to US defense planning in the 2030s as they appear to be today?  There seem to be two primary reasons for doubt.

The first reason for doubt is the possibility of nuclear proliferation among smaller and medium powers.  From the Persian Gulf War through Iraq and Libya, the United States could and regularly did fight militarily unlimited wars against “rogue states.”  While the United States exhibited admirable restraint towards civilians in these conflicts, it neither needed to nor did recognize any fundamental necessity for restraint in its conduct of the war against its adversary; rather, it pursued regime change and total victory.  US forces could conduct their campaigns of “shock and awe” without serious consideration for the enemy’s capability to escalate in response.

But the conditions that allowed this are changing.  Countries ranging from North Korea to Pakistan have learned by observing the US way of war against Iraq and Libya that, as an Indian general pithily remarked about what to learn from the First Gulf War, it is foolish to fight the Americans without nuclear weapons.  If more countries acquire nuclear weapons – and especially survivable nuclear weapons – the United States will have to casino online face the reality that adversaries might have the ability to launch nuclear attacks against its allies or even the United States itself even (and especially) if US forces initiate a full-scale attack.  This does not mean that the United States would need to forswear fighting nuclear-armed adversaries – but it would mean that the United States would need to learn – or relearn – how to fight limited wars, wars that seek to achieve US objectives while minimizing the probability that an adversary would escalate.

The second reason why nuclear weapons will probably be more salient is the likelihood of greater symmetry in the conventional military balance in theaters of prime interest to the United States.  While this is likely to be a longer-term development, the narrowing of US advantages in conventional warfare is likely to prompt US planners to think more about nuclear weapons as a way of shoring up its deterrent and defense postures by the 2030s.

The decline in the salience of nuclear weapons in the 1990s and early 2000s was a function of two events: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the maturation for the United States of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA).  The combination of these events propelled the United States to a position of olympian conventional superiority over any plausible foe in any plausible contingency.  But the strategic landscape has been changing.  A number of countries, above all China, are dedicating substantial resources to ambitious conventional military modernization programs.  And the RMA is spreading.  Countries such as China, Iran, India, Pakistan, and even non-state actors like Hezbollah are now exploiting the possibilities of advanced conventional weaponry, even as they also explore forms of “hybrid” warfare designed to undercut American military advantages.

The upshot of these developments is that the United States is likely to face a considerably more capable set of militaries than it did in the 1990s and 2000s, especially in the Pacific and the greater Middle East. US forces will have to strike deeper, harder, and more quickly against a wider range of adversary targets – and thereby take on greater escalatory risk – in order to accomplish military objectives against these opponents.  This reality will force American planners to consider the possibility that such conflicts could lead to escalation to the nuclear level with those states that possess such weapons.

Moreover, even with effective investments in cutting edge military technologies, by the 2030s the United States may face situations in which it finds itself at a conventional military disadvantage in regions of great importance to Washington, particularly the Western Pacific.  Depending on the trajectory of American investment in force modernization, US forces may, for instance, be inferior in the local balance of power or US power projection capabilities may rely on fragile, vulnerable, and readily disrupted or disabled assets. If the United States cannot achieve its regional military objectives with conventional forces, it will need to consider greater reliance on its nuclear forces to compensate for its conventional inferiority and/or vulnerabilities – if it wishes to maintain the network of extended deterrent guarantees that have undergirded global order since World War II.

The combination of these two trends suggests that nuclear weapons will play a more salient role in global politics by the 2030s than they have in the last two decades.

Elbridge Colby is a principal analyst and division lead for global strategic affairs at CNA.  He previously served in various positions with the US Government, where he focused on nuclear weapons policy and proliferation.

By Timothy Thomas

China’s ongoing Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is often defined as strategic thinking based on “Chinese characteristics.” Chinese characteristics, according to Hu Jintao, appear to include the informatization of the military system, to include military weaponry and equipment, theory, training, management, logistics, and political work. This focus somewhat follows a 1997 Chinese Military Affairs Dictionary definition of the RMA as “a reflection of qualitative changes in military technology, weapons and equipment, unit structure, war fighting methods, and military thought and theory.” Other Chinese RMA characteristics stressed by Hu and others include military reform and science and technology innovation, the latter described not only as the decisive factor and core competency of a modern military but also as the precursor and soul of the RMA. These advances shift China’s combat power generation model to one that relies on science and technology innovation in the opinion of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

Advancing the RMA is a strategic task whose goal is to control the strategic initiative in international military competition. In 2011 these RMA goals were advanced, according to a Nanfang Zhoumo Online article that stated that the General Staff created or reorganized three departments, the Informatization Department, the Strategic Planning Department, and the Military Training Department. These departments, according to the authors, provide the top-down design for military reform and innovation, and they help coordinate military-wide strategic planning and information command and control support. They serve as future design blueprints for seizing decisive opportunities and advantages, and they help build casino online an informatized military that can seize the initiative and win local wars under informatized conditions. Accelerating the RMA transformation and improving joint operations through the establishment of system-of-systems (SoS) capabilities allows for The animals of the aquarius horoscopes represent particular personality traits, and people have looked to these figures for thousands of years to help them understand the world and their role and future in it. responding to multiple security threats. To adapt to the world’s RMA, Hu Jintao stressed that the basic form of combat power is the SoS operations capability; the fundamental point of enhancing RMA capabilities is SoS capabilities; and the fundamental point of endeavor for military preparations is SoS capabilities. All of these Chinese RMA characteristics have appeared in the Chinese military press over the past two years.

Interestingly, most if not all of these characteristics seem to follow several recommendations first developed in the 2004 Chinese anthology On the Chinese Revolution in Military Affairs. This work included contributions from a host of influential information warfare and strategic thinking authorities, such as Dai Qinmin, Shen Weiguang, Wang Pufeng, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui of Unrestricted Warfare fame, Li Jijun, and Li Bingyan, among others. First the book noted that superior thought that develops a strategy of “imbalance” will avoid traveling the path that an enemy expects. In this sense, Li Bingyan noted, the RMA is really a cognition system revolution (which accords with the recent focus on innovation). Further, authors stressed the diversification in the pattern of war at the initial stage of the military revolution (which coincides with the necessity to seize the initiative). The RMA changes the face of war and thus the application of military strategy (which accords with a new Strategic Planning Department). Another author stated that the RMA included new technology and weaponry, organizational structure, and theory, strategy, and tactics (much like Hu’s listing of characteristics); and that information imparts an offensive character to warfare. Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui wrote that the RMA allows for control over front lines from rear lines, referring to the use of drones in Afghanistan. The only dissenting voice was that of Li Jijun, who noted that an RMA is not the same as reform or a revolution in military technology. The RMA is more expansive and quick, while reform and technology revolutions are more gradual and limited. Overall, however, the authors believe that the RMA is a revolution of an entire military architecture, but the manner in which it is understood cannot accommodate the US version. The RMA must be seen through the prism of Chinese military thought and culture, focusing on thinking as much as on technology. In other words, strategic thinking must be based on Chinese characteristics.

Overall, RMA advances in 2011 helped China’s deterrence and actual combat capabilities according to the Nanfang Zhoumo article. Two tendencies must be avoided in RMA preparations: moving too fast, and excessively using military resources.

Timothy Thomas is an analyst at the Foreign Military Studies Office, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

The rebalancing of the US defense portfolio from West to East Asia has been called a “pivot,” but the term arguably applies better to China’s strategic situation.  Over the past few decades, China has had momentum in the global military competition, but looking ahead, China will have to adjust to the reactions to its rapid build-up in the region.  These responses may put China on the wrong side of the cost-imposing equation. More generally, they may complicate China’s effort to reap strategic dividends from its modernization to date.

Up to the present, China has taken advantage of the conventional precision strike trend to build up a “counter-intervention” force, aimed at threatening, for example, expensive US power projection assets with relatively cheap missiles. Today, we are witnessing the fruits of China’s decades-long effort to construct a network of sensors and strike assets capable of hitting fixed and mobile targets – from runways in Taiwan and Guam to US aircraft carriers in China’s near seas. This has threatened the ability of the United States to project power by traditional means along China’s periphery. With logistics support, staging areas, and both surface naval and airborne platforms vulnerable to Chinese missiles, would the United States come to the defense of, say, the Philippines in the event of Chinese aggression against Filipino claims in the South China Sea?

There is another way of casting this question, however.  Looking forward, China’s emerging defense infrastructure will itself be vulnerable to conventional precision strike. From the Indian Ocean in the west to the Timor and Banda Seas in the south and the Sea of Japan in the north, regional states are acquiring their own counter-intervention capabilities to defend their interests and maintain stability in the context of outstanding territorial disputes, competition over resources, casino online and other potential disagreements with China.  Consider With 25 years of industry experience, ISO 9001:2008 certified in restore data and four class online casino 100 clean rooms, Nortek is uniquely equipped to recover your data. the following examples of observable and potential developments:

• India, Japan, and South Korea have all been investing in sophisticated cruise missiles that could threaten Chinese naval forces.

• Land-attack variants might be placed on submarines operating off of China’s coast. Australian Collins-class subs could carry Harpoon land attack cruise missiles (LACMs), and Vietnam has purchased Kilo-class submarines that could carry Russian LACMs.

• Former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Thomas Mahnken has proposed a West Pacific intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) consortium involving data from drones that would enable consortium members to detect and, presumably, target Chinese forces conducting incursions.

As the regional security environment evolves, and as China chooses to become an aggressor, the logic of precision strike will turn against it.В  Chinese power projection assets, rather than US forces, will be in the crosshairs.

Beyond the operational level, the spread of counter-intervention capabilities in the region could pose a serious challenge for Chinese strategy, which is centered on inflicting a devastating series of strikes at the outset of a conflict to paralyze or incapacitate the enemy so that China can prevail quickly.В  On their own or as part of a coalition, other states look poised to acquire the means to withstand such an onslaught and inflict damage on Chinese forces.

Would regional states really venture to use conventional precision strike against Chinese forces and risk nuclear retaliation? This question suggests the need for better understanding of nuclear proliferation dynamics in Asia. Observable trends include the prominence of tactical nuclear weapons in Russian doctrine; the build-up of fissile material by actors from India, Pakistan, and potentially the Middle East to North Korea; and developments in US and allied missile defense. In light of these factors, prospects for nuclear arms reductions by China look slim. Nuclear-related decisions by other regional actors will likely hinge in part on the fate of the US extended deterrent.В  Mark Stokes has noted that China may have its own version of prompt global strike by 2025, so it makes sense to ask about the impact of this capability on the credibility of the US commitment to the defense of regional allies and friends.

A final consideration is that China’s economic growth, a critical enabler of its defense modernization to date, is beginning to slow, as the draft Global Trends report notes.  This will affect China’s ability to sustain defense budget increases across the board and necessitate potentially difficult trade-offs among investments.  For these and other reasons, leading Chinese security scholars such as Shi Yinhong and Wang Jisi have begun to debate whether China’s period of strategic opportunity is ending.  A perceived closing window of opportunity could affect Chinese decisions about Taiwan or other disputed territory on land (e.g., along the border with India) and at sea (e.g., in the East and South China Seas) in surprising ways.