By Army Sgt. 1st Class Tyrone C. Marshall Jr.
DoD News, Defense Media Activity
WASHINGTON, Sept. 19, 2014 - The Defense Department is using its resources and stated defense strategy to examine methods of employing technology to prevent the root causes of future armed conflict, a senior DoD official said here today.
|
Alan Shaffer, principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for research and engineering, discussed the department's efforts during the PeaceTech Summit at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
"It's a particularly interesting time right now in the department," he said. "So you here are talking about peace, and yet we have very, very serious armed conflict going on around the world right now." He cited examples such as Iraq, Ukraine, Thailand and the Central African Republic.
"All of these are troublesome to the Department of Defense, and they're troublesome to the nation," he said.
Examining root causes of armed conflict
"So how do we start to relieve some of these?" Shaffer asked. "We see growing tensions through the conflux of transnational criminal organizations with terrorists and how those things work back and forth, leading to armed conflict."
Shaffer said the United States is coming out of about a 35-year period in which it had the world's most dominant military capa-bility. "But there are other nations now that are coming onboard with very advanced, high-end weapons systems," he said. "That poses a challenge, because that increases the chance of conflict. So we have to pay attention to the where the department is going."
Shaffer encouraged the summit's audience to examine DoD's pub-lished defense strategy "a remarkable document" because it "really is a blueprint for a wonderful, wonderful world where we're trying to bring in peace."
Implementing the strategy is producing a shift in momentum for the Defense Department toward smaller operations, Shaffer said. "We're looking at packages to de-escalate armed conflict before it happens," he added.
Defense Department initiatives
Three key initiatives, Shaffer said, are the Minerva initiative, international science and technology, and how DoD is supporting the United Nations.
"Minerva is a fairly small program," he said. "But it is the de-partment's outreach to the sociologists [and] anthropologists community to start to understand the base roots of armed conflict and violence. Minerva looks at things as disparate as large data sets to look for signals early, ... like the Arab Spring, to try to pick out the precursors."
Large data sets, he said, help in understanding some of the flow of commerce from transnational criminal organizations and ter-rorists, Shaffer said, because there's "an amazing correlation."
"They feed off each other," he added, "and that continues to perpetuate violence."
Understand some of the root causes of some of these activities facilitates treating the symptom rather than the event, Shaffer said. "And that's really the point of Minerva how do you treat the symptom?" he told the audience.
Regarding international science and technology, Shaffer said the Defense Department has university grants with researchers in 57 nations.
"Our DoD is a global enterprise for funding research and devel-opment and research in universities," he said. "We have research grants in countries such as Ethiopia, Vietnam, China and Jordan, just to name four. Those are not places you would normally think of the DoD operating. But we believe, very strongly, that one of the best ways to reduce potential for armed conflict through mu-tual understanding."
Technology also plays a part in efforts to address the root causes of conflict, Shaffer said, noting that DoD has developed a series of joint capability technology demonstration programs to increase deployable packages for information technology. And multiple platforms with communications, power and energy capa-bilities are able to be deployed in response to a natural disas-ter and give response officials the best possible information awareness, he added.
"The more situational awareness you can give to people that are in charge on the ground," he said, "the more quickly you can re-turn operations and life to as near normal as you can. That is a big deal."
No comments:
Post a Comment