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Seth G. Jones is an academic, political scientist, author, and former senior official in the U.S. Department of Defense. Jones is most renowned for his work on defense strategy, the defense industrial base, irregular warfare, and counterterrrorism. Much of his published work and media interviews are on defense strategy; Chinese, Russian, and Iranian conventional and irregular capabilities and actions; and terrorist and insurgent groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. He is currently a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. [1]
Seth G. Jones is senior vice president, Harold Brown Chair, and Director of the International Security Program [2] at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. [3] He also teaches at Johns Hopkins University's School for Advanced International Studies [4] and the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. [5]
Jones is a Commissioner on the Afghanistan War Commission, a bipartisan commission established by the U.S. Congress to review key decisions related to U.S. military, intelligence, foreign assistance, and diplomatic involvement in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021. [6] He also served on the 9/11 Review Commission, which was formed by Congress in January 2014 to review the counterterrorism and other recommendations related to the FBI that were proposed by the original 9/11 Commission. [7]
Prior to joining CSIS, Jones was the director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation, where he worked from 2003 to 2017. He also served as the representative for the commander, U.S. Special Operations Command, to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations in 2010 and 2011, and as a plans officer and advisor to the commanding general, U.S. Special Operations Forces, in Afghanistan (Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command–Afghanistan). [8]
From 2002-2009, he was also an adjunct professor at the Security Studies Program in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, where he taught classes on "Counterinsurgency" and "Stability Operations." [9]
Jones is the author of six books: "Three Dangerous Men: Russia, China, Iran, and the Rise of Irregular Warfare" (W.W. Norton, 2021), "A Covert Action: Reagan, the CIA, and the Cold War Struggle in Poland" (W.W. Norton, 2018), "Waging Insurgent Warfare: Lessons from the Vietcong to the Islamic State" (Oxford University Press, 2016), "Hunting in the Shadows: The Pursuit of al Qa'ida since 9/11" (W.W. Norton, 2012), "In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan" (W.W. Norton, 2009), and "The Rise of European Security Cooperation" (Cambridge University Press, 2007). [10] He has published articles on U.S. foreign policy and defense strategy in International Security, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, Political Science Quarterly, Security Studies, Chicago Journal of International Law , International Affairs, and Survival, as well as such newspapers and magazines as Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Newsweek , Financial Times , International Herald Tribune , and Chicago Tribune .
He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1995, with High Honors in Government, Phi Beta Kappa, and Summa Cum Laude. [11] He received his MA in 1999 and PhD in 2004 from the University of Chicago. [12]
Jones attracted considerable attention in 2023 for his work on the U.S. defense industrial base. [13] In a 2023 report titled "Empty Bins in a Wartime Environment: The Challenge to the U.S. Defense Industrial Base," he argued that the U.S. defense industrial base and defense ecosystem were not adequately prepared for an era of great power competition. [14] In a protracted regional war, such as against China in the Taiwan Strait, the United States would likely run out of critical weapons (such as Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles, or LRASMs) in less than a week. Some of the findings were based on a series of CSIS wargames of a Chinese conventional invasion of Taiwan. [15] Jones also argued that China's defense industrial base is on a wartime footing, while the U.S. industrial base remains largely on a peacetime footing. He noted that China's shipbuilding capacity was more than 230 times as large as the U.S.’s, and that one Chinese shipyard has more capacity than all U.S. shipyards combined. [16]
Jones also received significant interest for his work on Russian, Chinese, and Iranian irregular warfare and gray zone activity. His book, "Three Dangerous Men: Russia, China, Iran, and the Rise of Irregular Warfare," argues that an increasingly important part of great power competition is irregular warfare: cyber attacks, the use of proxy forces, propaganda, espionage, and disinformation. [17] Before and immediately after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Jones was on CNN virtually every night providing satellite imagery and analysis of Russian military operations. [18]
In addition, Jones attracted widespread attention for his historical analysis of Afghanistan and Pakistan in his book In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan. The book examines the collapse of the Zahir Shah regime, the rise of the anti-Soviet war, the Afghan civil war in the early 1990s, the Taliban take-over of much of the country in the late 1990s, the U.S-led overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001, and the subsequent insurgency. [19]
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Zalmay Mamozy Khalilzad is an American diplomat and foreign policy expert. Khalilzad was U.S. special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation from September 2018 to October 2021. Khailzad was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve as United States ambassador to the United Nations, serving in the role from 2007 to 2009. Khalilzad was the highest ranking Muslim-American in government at the time he left the position. Prior to this, Khalilzad served in the Bush administration as ambassador to Afghanistan from 2004 to 2005 and Ambassador to Iraq from 2005 to 2007.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) is an American think tank based in Washington, D.C. From its founding in 1962 until 1987, it was an affiliate of Georgetown University, initially named the Center for Strategic and International Studies of Georgetown University. The center conducts policy studies and strategic analyses of political, economic and security issues throughout the world, with a focus on issues concerning international relations, trade, technology, finance, energy and geostrategy.
An insurgency is a violent, armed rebellion by small, lightly armed bands who practice guerrilla warfare against a larger authority. The key descriptive feature of insurgency is its asymmetric nature: small irregular forces face a large, well-equipped, regular military force state adversary. Due to this asymmetry, insurgents avoid large-scale direct battles, opting instead to blend in with the civilian population where they gradually expand territorial control and military forces. Insurgency frequently hinges on control of and collaboration with local populations.
International Military Education and Training (IMET) is the title of a United States security assistance program, a type of student exchange program.
John Arquilla is an American analyst and academic of international relations.
Kenneth Guy Lieberthal is an American professor and politician known as an expert on China's elite politics, political economy, domestic and foreign policy decision making, and on the evolution of US-China relations.
In political science, Noopolitik, formed by a combination of the Greek words νόος nóos ("knowledge") and πολιτικός politikós, is the network-based geopolitics of knowledge. The term was invented by defense experts John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt in a 1999 RAND Corporation study and often appears in connection with that of smart power.
Steven Kent Metz is an American author and former professor of national security and strategy at the U.S. Army War College specializing in insurgency and counterinsurgency, American defense policy, strategic theory, the African security environment, and future warfare.
Foreign internal defense (FID) is a term used by the military in several countries, including the United States, France and the United Kingdom, to describe an integrated or multi-country approach to combating actual or threatened insurgency in a foreign state. This foreign state is known as the Host Nation (HN) under the US doctrine. The term counter-insurgency is commonly used for FID.
Irregular warfare (IW) is defined in United States joint doctrine as "a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant populations." In practice, control of institutions and infrastructure is also important. Concepts associated with irregular warfare are older than the term itself.
James Francis Dobbins Jr. was an American diplomat who served as United States ambassador to the European Union (1991–1993), assistant secretary of state for European affairs (2001), and special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy. Additionally, Dobbins served as envoy to Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, and Somalia. In 2001, he led negotiations leading to the Bonn Agreement, and served as acting ambassador of the United States to Afghanistan during the transitional period. He was later head of international and security policy for the RAND Corporation.
Robert Edwards Hunter is an American government employee and foreign policy expert who was United States ambassador to NATO during the Clinton administration.
Bruce R. Hoffman is an American political analyst. He specializes in the study of terrorism, counter-terrorism, insurgency, and counter-insurgency. Hoffman serves as the Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security on the Council on Foreign Relations, and is a professor at the School of Foreign Service of Georgetown University. In addition, he is the Professor Emeritus and Honorary Professor of Terrorism Studies at the University of St Andrews, and is the George H. Gilmore Senior Fellow at the U.S. Military Academy's Combating Terrorism Center.
Michael Paul Pillsbury is a foreign policy strategist, author, and former public official in the United States. He is a senior fellow for China strategy at The Heritage Foundation and has been Director of the Center on Chinese Strategy at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., since 2014. Before Hudson, he held various postings in the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Senate. He has been called a "China-hawk", and an "architect" of Trump's policy towards China. In 2018, he was described by Donald Trump as the leading authority on the country.
Arturo G. Muñoz is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) senior intelligence officer with three decades of analytical skills and operational experience, both in the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) and in the Directorate of Operations (DO). He managed highly classified covert-operations and HUMINT collections for the CIA National Clandestine Service in various high-ranking positions. Muñoz is highly regarded at the CIA as an intelligence officer and a psychological operations expert with countless successful programs; to include innovative covert action campaigns with verifiable impacts in Latin America, Southwest Asia, the Balkans, the Middle-East, and North-Africa. Muñoz is a well known pundit on national security, international affairs, espionage and U.S. foreign policy.
Dr. William H. Overholt is a senior research fellow at John F. Kennedy School of Government's Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard University and principal of AsiaStrat LLC, a consulting firm.
Martin C. Libicki is an American scholar and Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica, California.
Michael Patrick Mulroy is the former United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (DASD) for the Middle East, serving under Secretary James N. Mattis and Secretary Mark T. Esper. He was responsible for representing the United States Department of Defense (DoD) for defense policy and for Middle East policy in the interagency. He is also a retired CIA Paramilitary Operations Officer and a United States Marine.
Security Force Assistance (SFA) a term originating in the United States Armed Forces for military adviser assistance with "training, equipping and advising allied or 'partner' militaries to enable them to defend themselves without 100,000 Americans on the ground to do it for them." SFA is used when improving the security of the host country aligns with the national interests of the donor country. It may be used alongside or instead of larger commitments of the donor country's military personnel and matériel. This means SFA can provide an alternative to large-scale operations if a war becomes controversial or politically difficult. Given the ending of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with US-led multinational missions to train and equip the militaries of weak states for counterinsurgency and counterterrorism purposes, the US have increasingly shifted towards SFA programs that make host-nation security force more capable of conducting Large Scale Combat Operations (LSCO).
Jude Blanchette is an American foreign policy analyst and China specialist currently serving as Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
