THE WATCH STAFF The challenges facing the Arctic have come into greater focus as the region becomes an arena of strategic competition for natural resources. A number of conferences addressed Arctic issues in 2021 — from perspectives ranging from those of the U.S. military and its partners to the cultural and economic. Here is the second installment in a series by The Watch that samples these academic insights. Dr. Marc Lanteigne | Associate professor of political science, The Arctic University of Norway, Tromso (UiT) Lanteigne was a panelist on “China and the Arctic: Great Power Competition, Security and Regional Responses,”…
The Watch
REUTERS Britain, France, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Russia and the United States have agreed that a further spread of nuclear arms and a nuclear war should be avoided, according to a joint statement by the five nuclear powers published January 3, 2022. The statement said the five countries, which are the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, consider it their primary responsibility to avoid war between the nuclear states and to reduce strategic risks, while aiming to work with all countries to create an atmosphere of security. “We affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won…
REUTERS Western countries should have a united front against the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to prevent the Asian state from using commercial interests to play them against each other, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in an interview aired December 25, 2021. Trudeau, pictured, said the PRC has been pitting Western countries against each other as they compete for access to economic opportunities in China. “We’ve been competing, and China has been, from time to time, very cleverly playing us off each other in an open-market, competitive way,” he said in an interview with Global television. “We need to…
THE WATCH STAFF U.S. Army scientists are expected to announce the development of a breakthrough vaccine engineered to combat current and future variants of the virus that causes COVID-19. Dr. Kayvon Modjarrad, director of the Emerging Infectious Diseases branch at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR), told the website Defense One on December 22, 2021, that news of an effective vaccine — called a spike ferritin nanoparticle (SpFN) — is expected “within weeks.” (Pictured: The U.S. Army’s SpFN vaccine is considered a breakthrough in the fight against coronavirus variants.) “The accelerating emergence of human coronaviruses throughout the past two decades…
THE WATCH STAFF The U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has regained control over the research and development of lasers to defend against ballistic and hypersonic threats. U.S. President Joe Biden on December 27, 2021, signed into law the fiscal year 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which gave the authority back to the MDA and reversed a decision by the previous U.S. administration to halt the agency’s laser-interceptor research. The NDAA sets funding levels and provides policy guidance for the Department of Defense. The secretary of defense is now required to delegate to the MDA director the authority to “budget…
THE WATCH STAFF The challenges facing the Arctic have come into greater focus as the region becomes an arena of strategic competition over its natural resources. A number of conferences addressed Arctic issues in 2021 — from perspectives ranging from those of the U.S. military and its partners to the scholarly and diplomatic. Here, in a first installment, The Watch presents excerpts of some of those insights. (Pictured: U.S. Army Soldiers train north of the Arctic Circle.) James P. DeHart | Coordinator for the Arctic Region, U.S. Department of State DeHart spoke on “Managing Security Through Diplomacy” during a November…
REUTERS U.S. President Joe Biden signed two new executive orders intended to fight drug trafficking and criminal networks in December 2021, allowing for new sanctions on Chinese companies trading ingredients of the opioid drug fentanyl and on criminal gangs in Brazil, Mexico and Colombia. The Biden administration is trying to stem a worsening U.S. opioid crisis that has fueled more than 100,000 drug overdose deaths in the year to April 2021, a 28% increase from the same period a year earlier, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. The U.S. Treasury said it imposed sanctions on 25 entities…
REUTERS Russia and the United States will engage in high-level security talks in January 2022 amid heightened tensions over Moscow’s military presence at its border with Ukraine. The planned talks were established following a late December 2021 call between U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, pictured, and Chief of Russian General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov to discuss “regional security-related issue of concern,” according to a readout of the call. “The phone call is a continuation of communication between both leaders to ensure risk reduction and operational deconfliction. In accordance with past practice, both have agreed to keep…
THE WATCH STAFF The U.S. Army is poised to deliver “tactical cloud” capability in 2022 as the service modernizes its information networks — part of a digital strategy to dominate the information battlespace in future conflicts. The tactical cloud would allow the Army to get data to Soldiers quickly and more effectively. Rather than sending it from the field to a centralized data center for processing — a time-consuming process — the Army would leverage the cloud to process the data where it is generated, according to a July 29, 2019, story by defense technology website C4ISRNET. The cloud would be…
THE WATCH STAFF Anyone considering buying an electric vehicle has heard of “range anxiety” — the fear of running out of power on a trip and not being able to find a charging station. The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is taking a step to avoid such worries. The startup Electric Sky Inc. announced in a news release December 7, 2021, that it is building the world’s first “Whisper Beam” transmitter for the wireless charging of in-flight unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, with an initial funding of U.S. $225,000 from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In…