Fortifying U.S. National security Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4000 words

Fortifying U.S. National security - Essay Example To respond to the first two revolutions requires foreign policy initiatives in the Middle East and elsewhere as bold as the Marshall Plan and as encompassing as energy security. (Tucker, 2006) To create a national security strategy requires an understanding of the changing nature of conflict particularly, and that requires an understanding of the erosion of the sovereignty of nation-states. For 350 years, wars have been fought between the uniformed armies of nations with fixed borders, meeting in the field to achieve a political result. Rules evolved for these wars: Geneva conventions and a body of international law spell out the norms for humane treatment and repatriation of prisoners, the rights of noncombatants, rules against the use of torture, and so forth. Nations disintegrate; and when a nation disintegrates, as in the former Yugoslavia, geographic borders warp and sometimes evaporate. (Clancey, 2006) Indeed, part of the process of creating peace among ethnic combatants in a disintegrating nation involves drawing new boundaries and building new nations. And now, in the new age of terrorism, United States experience violence being perpetrated by combatants in civilian clothes, representing no nation, attacking civilian targets, with no political agenda, and possessing only a fanatical commitment to destruction for its own sake. When the nature of conflict changes, the means of assuring security must also change. New forms of violence resemble war, but by historic standards they are not. What is this new conflict, and how should United States deal with it United States call much of this new kind of violence terrorism. But labeling every bad actor a terrorist tempts us to embrace wretched allies on the always-dubious theory that the enemy of our enemy is our friend. On this same theory, United States supported undemocratic and repressive authoritarian oligarchies during the Cold War simply because they were opposed to communism. (Howard, 2006) United States set about assassinating foreign leaders United States did not like. The bills United States accrue from despicable allies and unprincipled policies that undermine the very principles United States claim to defend, however, always come due. In the past ten years, United States have seen a dozen or more low intensity conflicts between tribes, clans, and gangs. United States participated in some, including in Somalia, where United States experienced the painful consequences of brawling, however well intentioned, in another man's alley as memorialized in the fi lm Black Hawk Down. United States passively observed similar bloody confl icts, in Rwanda and elsewhere, where the weapon of choice, a machete, dated to the Bronze Age. (Korb, 2006) United States successfully formed a "coalition of the willing," essentially an ad hoc international posse, in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Kuwait. United States earned a quick victory in Kuwait largely due to intensive bombing and maneuver

Final Research Paper Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Final Research Paper - Essay Example Organizations are also measured by how much operations are differentiated or integrated: Differentiation is the extent to which jobs are specialized, whereas integration shows the extent to which different work units cooperate. how authority is distributed throughout the organization. If that authority, such as over hiring and spending, is concentrated in the upper echelons, the organization is known as being centralized; if it is spread out, it is considered decentralized. No one organizational scheme is better than another; the contingency approach to studying structure deems that "successful organizations develop a structure consistent with the pattern of goals and the strategy established by senior management" (Schermerhorn et al., 2005, 516). During the Reagan era, Microsoft was the scrappy underdog whose staff openly laughed at the moribund IBM. The company went public in 1986. The Office suite of productivity applications for the workplace first appeared in 1989; Windows 3.0 operating system debuted the next year. The young Microsoft fostered an aggressive business environment centered on the personal computer both in the home and in businesses. When the market exploded in the 1990s, the company quickly became so large and so dominant that in 1998, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the company for monopolistic practices. The settlement in 2001 split operations along the Windows and Office lines and forced the company to accept partnerships with rivals like Sun and Netscape (Greene, et al. 2004). The case in and of itself did not hinder Microsoft's growth: The Windows operating system runs on 330 million personal computers around the world, about 90 percent of the PC operating system market. Windows is installed by mo re than 300 PC manufacturers and helps run thousands of peripherals like printers, scanners and increasingly, portable music players. Thousands of software programs by independent developers run on Windows (Lohr & Markoff, 2006). New versions of Windows and Office are scheduled to debut in the near future and the company's new entry into the console gaming market, X-Box 360, debuted last year to generally good reviews. The company is still dealing with antitrust charges in the European Union, though it has recently promised to deal more fairly with competitors (Buck, 2006). Microsoft's policy has been to go through periodic reorganizations, sometimes as often as every two years. Founder and Chairman Bill Gates has said this is a necessary part of the company's strategy. "Even though reorganizations are expected, they still create anxiety for almost everyone, including me," (Bateman & Snell, 2003, p. 267). Though Gates stepped down as chief executive officer in 2000 and handed the reins to current CEO Steve Ballmer, he remains the face of