The Israel Defence Force returned fire into Syria after a military jeep was damaged by shots fired by Syrian armed forces overnight, prompting both countries to lodge a complaint with the UN.

It is the latest in a string of cross border incidents that have led to rising tensions in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, peaking earlier this month when Israel launched air strikes inside Syria, allegedly on advanced weapons bound for Hezbollah.

-snip-

And while some analysts say the Syrian Government has made significant progress in its attempt to regain as much opposition-held ground as possible before US and Russia-backed peace talks scheduled for next month, others say it is simply part of the constantly shifting fortunes of the conflict.

''The Assad regime is regaining ground,'' said one Syria analyst who did not want to be named. ''If things continue as they are now it is quite possible that Assad will stay in power.''

Others urged caution in analysing the last three days of battle, with Mona Yacoubian, a senior Middle East advisor at the Washington-based Stimson Centre warning Syria would likely continue to be trapped in a ''deadly stalemate''.

''To view this as a turning point where the revolution will wither on the vine ... would be wrong - this is offensive and counter-offensive and what this means is more misery and more death,'' she said.

''The regime is consolidating control in Damascus and along strategic corridors mainly through Homs and to the coast, there is no doubt about it... however, I do not see opposition-controlled areas in north and east going back to regime control.''

to read the full sory, click here.

Under sequestration, DoD will have to cut its previously planned spending by more than $500 billion over the next ten years. The approach is painful, across the board and haphazard - military leaders have warned it will cause a crisis in readiness. But there's no shortage of ideas on how to trim defense spending without drastically harming military capability. Washington is awash in the cost-cutting recommendations of boards and commissions, most of which have gone ignored by Congress. And a new review of those ideas by the Stimson Center says altogether, they could save about a trillion dollars if they were implemented. Russell Rumbaugh the director of Stimson's budgeting for foreign affairs program and a coauthor of that new report, joins In Depth with his take on DoD cost cutting. 

To hear the full interview, click here.

As China prepares for another launch to its Tiangong-1 mini-space station next month (illustration), political scientists with an interest in space policy see the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) as a model for bringing China into "the family of space-faring nations." The ASTP was a symbolic gesture that encouraged an eventual Cold War thaw, and was considered as such even before the historic "handshake in space" between the crews of a U.S. Apollo command module and a Soviet Soyuz capsule.

The docking had little technical significance, but it laid the groundwork for a thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations that extended into strategic arms control and ultimately led to the merger of the two superpowers' space station programs that became the International Space Station.

"It's a beginning, like the arms control thing," President Richard Nixon said of the space-cooperation agreement he and Premier Alexei Kosygin signed at their May 1972 summit meeting. U.S. historian John Logsdon discovered the quote on one of Nixon's infamous Oval Office tapes as he was researching the former president's role in U.S. space policy.

"With respect to space, Richard Nixon was a pretty strong internationalist from the start," Logsdon says. "He suggested, as John Kennedy had suggested in his inaugural address, that space was an area where countries could cooperate."

That thinking is definitely in force today, as U.S. astronauts take turns with cosmonauts and space travelers from Canada, Japan and the European Space Agency in commanding the ISS. But China, the only other nation to orbit its own crews, is blocked by U.S. law from even visiting the station.

The U.S. and China are forbidden to cooperate in civil space on human-rights grounds, by language Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) attached to NASA's appropriations bill. Military space cooperation between the two nations is actually easier, to the extent that the Pentagon's Africa Command has been using Chinese-owned Apstar-7 for commercial communications links.

That arrangement raised congressional eyebrows when it surfaced at a recent House Armed Services Committee hearing, but it illustrates the kind of cooperation U.S.-China experts convened by the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank, say could ease tensions and improve U.S. leadership in space.

To read the full story, click here.

The Defense Department, already considering compensation and benefits cuts, can reduce its personnel costs further by eliminating overlapping programs and people, says a new report from the nonpartisan Stimson Center.

To read the fully story, click here.

These officials, part of the Strategic Choices and Management Review (SCMR), are preparing for a range of budget cuts - $100 billion, $300 billion and $500 billion - sources said.

-snip-

"If you're really serious about the back office and you're really serious about bringing down the force structure, you don't need to terminate all the acquisition programs," said Gordon Adams, an analyst with the Stimson Center who oversaw defense budgets during the Clinton administration.

To read the full story, click here.

"Outside intervention in these circumstances is a long shot, at best," in terms of entering a nation in crisis and attempting to locate and secure any so-called "loose nukes" held by rogue actors or extremists, Brian Jenkins, a senior adviser to the RAND Corp. president, said at a Wednesday presentation.

"One should not have any degree of optimism that we can do this," he said, speaking at the Stimson Center. "This is much more complicated than, for example, going after Osama bin Laden."

To read the full story, click here.

(CNN) -- Hundreds of candidates are vying to become Iran's next president, with hopefuls ranging from friends to foes of current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

A total of 686 candidates have registered for the June election, Iran's state-run Press TV reported.

Ahmadinejad is term-limited and cannot run for a third straight term.

But other big names are in the mix, including Ahmadinejad's top aide Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei and former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Ahmadinejad has been grooming Mashaei to take over for years, and the two are like-minded in their nationalism and shared disdain for the clerical establishment, according to Geneive Abdo, a fellow at the Stimson Center's Middle East Program and a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution.

To read the full story, click here.

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Contact: Rich Robinson, deputy director of communications

202-478-4391 or communications@stimson.org

WASHINGTON - The Managing Across Boundaries Initiative at the Stimson Center is expanding to seek practical solutions to a broader range of security threats confronting nations and businesses around the world, Stimson President and CEO Ellen Laipson announced today.

The initiative, originally focused on nuclear nonproliferation, has widened its scope and added staff to study additional threats, Laipson said. These include the smuggling across international borders of arms, weapons of mass destruction, illegal narcotics, people, laundered money, counterfeit goods and intellectual property.

"We're working with the private sector and nongovernmental organizations as well as governments to find innovative ways to protect them from international criminals and terrorists who have no respect for national borders," Laipson said. "Outlaws are using evolving technologies and increasingly creative schemes to enrich themselves and victimize societies, so it makes sense for the targets of these attacks to work together to defend themselves."

Managing Across Boundaries amalgamates several programs:

-Working with developing countries in the Global South to address threats to security that impinge upon economic growth and development.

-Working with private industry to simultaneously reduce transnational security threats while enhancing market opportunities.

-Reducing the unregulated trade in conventional arms that can provide weapons to terrorists and criminals, while ensuring the legitimate arms trade is not impeded.

-Seeking coordinated global action involving national and local governments, industry and donors to promote health programs and save lives.

-Reducing the sale of counterfeit goods - which now account for 5 to 7 percent of world trade, according to the International Chamber of Commerce - by working with governments and the private sector.

Each of these threats poses immediate security challenges and long-term development threats.

The Managing Across Boundaries Initiative is headed by Managing Director Brian Finlay. The deputy director of the program is Johan Berganas. Rachel Stohl is a senior associate and Nathaniel Olson is a research associate. Senior advisors are Debra Decker and Allen Moore. In addition, Ochieng Adala and O'Neil Hamilton are visiting fellows for the program.

"Our work is focusing on a wide variety of transnational security threats and development challenges that are complex and inseparable," Finlay said. "We're exploring innovative and pragmatic policy recommendations that spring from the space in between established paradigms and by engaging public and private sector stakeholders in innovative relationships."

"Managing Across Boundaries is working to better pool government and private resources made necessary by current economic realities," Finlay added.

Managing Across Boundaries is an outgrowth of the Beyond Boundaries Initiative at Stimson, which was recently the subject of a laudatory report by the Carnegie Foundation. The foundation said Beyond Boundaries, which is now sustainably funded by governments, is "an initiative to build an effective model for sustainable nonproliferation of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The project represented an exciting and innovative way of thinking about security."

A few of the problems the Managing Across Boundaries Initiative is designed to deal with are illustrated by these statistics:

-One quarter of the annual $4 billion small arms trade around the world is unauthorized or illicit.

-According to the U.S. government, approximately 800,000 incidents of international human trafficking occur every year. This figure does not include the millions of other people who are trafficked within their own countries.

-According to the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime, the global illegal drug trade is worth an estimated $322 billion annually, with 52,356 metric tons of opium, cannabis, cocaine and amphetamine-type stimulants produced each year.

Why is the agricultural lobby so mad at Obama?

We can spend a lot of time (and I do) on the politics of the defense budget and the Iron Triangle that binds the Pentagon, the defense industry, and key members of Congress, making reform in the defense world difficult to execute. But there are a lot of other triangles that close around pieces of the federal budget. One of them comes up this week as the Senate marks up the Farm Bill and addresses the administration's proposed reform of the U.S. food aid program.

To read the full op-ed, click here.