Since 1939, the U.S. government, using the National Defense Stockpile (NDS), has been stockpiling critical strategic materials for national defense. The economic and national security environments, however, have changed significantly from the time the NDS was created. Current threats are more varied, production and processing of key materials is more globally dispersed, the global competition for raw materials is increasing, the U.S. military is more dependent on civilian industry, and industry depends far more on just-in-time inventory control. To help determine the significance of these changes for the strategic materials stockpile, the Department of Defense asked the NRC to assess the continuing need for and value of the NDS. This report begins with the historical context of the NDS. It then presents a discussion of raw-materials and minerals supply, an examination of changing defense planning and materials needs, an analysis of modern tools used to manage materials supply chains, and an assessment of current operational practices of the NDS.

Alliance politics is a regular headline grabber. When a possible military crisis involving Russia, North Korea, or China rears its head, leaders and citizens alike raise concerns over the willingness of US allies to stand together. As rival powers have tightened their security cooperation, the United States has stepped up demands that its allies increase their defense spending and contribute more to military operations in the Middle East and elsewhere. The prospect of former President Donald Trump unilaterally ending alliances alarmed longstanding partners, even as NATO was welcoming new members into its ranks. Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century is the first book to explore fully the politics that shape these security arrangements – from their initial formation through the various challenges that test them and, sometimes, lead to their demise. Across six thematic chapters, Alexander Lanoszka challenges conventional wisdom that has dominated our understanding of how military alliances have operated historically and into the present. Although military alliances today may seem uniquely hobbled by their internal difficulties, Lanoszka argues that they are in fact, by their very nature, prone to dysfunction.

This book is the fifth in an annual series. It provides up-to-date information on the politics, economy and society of both South and North Korea. Each volume is structured as follows: The first part offers the reader an up-to-date analysis and commentary on the following topics: "Domestic Politics and the Economy in South Korea", "Domestic Politics and the Economy in North Korea", "Relations between the two Koreas", and "Foreign Relations of the two Koreas". A detailed chronology of relevant events in the year preceding publication complements this first part. The second part consists of some eight to ten refereed, original articles with contributions on contemporary Korean affairs in fields such as politics, economy and society. For regular and professional observers of Korea in business, politics, the media and academia, this book series is an indispensable resource both for keeping track of developments, and for gathering new insights.

This book is aimed to compile the distribution of rare earth elements in various resources with their processing from secondary resources. It includes details of various processes developed for extraction of rare earth elements from varied raw materials ranging from e-wastes, tailings, process wastes and residues. It emphasizes importance of processing of the secondary resources to assist environmental remediation of such untreated wastes and get finished products. It covers all aspects of rare metals and rare earth metals in one volume covering extraction, separation and recycling of secondary resources for extraction of these metals along with relevant case studies.

This book focuses on the key issues that affect military families when soldiers are deployed overseas, focusing on the support given to military personnel and families before, during and after missions. Today’s postmodern armies are expected to provide social-psychological support both to their personnel in military operations abroad and to their families at home. Since the end of the Cold War and even more so after 9/11, separations between military personnel and their families have become more frequent as there has been a multitude of missions carried out by multinational task forces all over the world. The book focuses on three central questions affecting military families. First, how do changing missions and tasks of the military affect soldiers and families? Second, what is the effect of deployments on the ones left behind? Third, what is the national structure of family support systems and its evolution? The book employs a multidisciplinary approach, with contributions from psychology, sociology, history, anthropology and others. In addition, it covers all the services, Army, Navy/Marines, Air Force, spanning a wide range of countries, including UK, USA, Belgium, Turkey, Australia and Japan. At the same time it takes a multitude of perspectives such as the theoretical, empirical, reflective, life events (narrative) approach, national and the global, and uses approaches from different disciplines and perspectives, combining them to produce a volume that enhances our knowledge and understanding of military families. This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, sociology, war and conflict studies and IR/political science in general.

Our current production-consumption system extracts raw materials from the earth, creates tangible products and after one or two uses, disposes of them in landfills. Recycle Everything; Why We Must, How We Can provides evidence of declining availability of raw materials from respected journals and organizations including the Department of Defense. The book explains how materials can be recycled in a system that retains and reuses them perpetually. In addition to parts suppliers, producers, distributors and consumers, there are new roles: collectors, disassemblers, used-parts brokers and materials processors. These new roles make it possible to recover, reprocess and reuse materials. Products are no longer sold and their materials lost; they are leased and tracked on their entire journey around the system from producer to consumer and back to producer. Finally, the book briefly describes the Institute for Material Sustainability and its role in helping industries transform themselves from linear systems dependent on extraction to systems that are self-sufficient and sustainable indefinitely into the future.

This book examines the key dimensions of 21st century war, and shows that orthodox thinking about war, particularly what it is and how it is fought, needs to be updated. Accelerating societal, economic, political and technological change affects how we prepare, equip and organise for war, as well as how we conduct war – both in its low-tech and high-tech forms, and whether it is with high intensity or low intensity. The volume examines changes in warfare by investigating the key features of the conduct of war during the first decades of the 21st century. Conceptually centred around the terms ‘kinetic’, ‘connected’ and ‘synthetic’, the analysis delves into a wide range of topics. The contributions discuss hybrid warfare, cyber and influence activities, machine learning and artificial intelligence, the use of armed drones and air power, the implications of the counterinsurgency experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, as well as the consequences for law(fare) and decision making. This work will be of much interest to students of military and strategic studies, security studies and International Relations. Chapters 1, 2, 5, and 19 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Tracing the history of economic sanctions from the blockades of World War I to the policing of colonial empires and the interwar confrontation with fascism, Nicholas Mulder combines political, economic, legal, and military history to reveal how a coercive wartime tool was adopted as an instrument of peacekeeping by the League of Nations.This timely study casts an overdue light on why sanctions are widely considered a form of war, and why their unintended consequences are so tremendous.