Böcker av Karen M Sudkamp

"Over the coming decades, stressors from climate change will become more intense and more frequent in the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) area of responsibility (AOR). This development will likely contribute to CENTCOM's broader shift from a warfighting-focused command to a command that will have to reprioritize and balance how it responds to and conducts both traditional and nontraditional security missions. This report addresses how CENTCOM planners can use operations, activities, and investments to prevent -- or mitigate the intensity of -- climate-related conflict. Climate change, along with other transnational threats, is often discussed as part of a broader concept known as nontraditional security. Many of the threats that are part of the nontraditional security concept, such as infectious disease and large-scale migration, are exacerbated by climate change. This report examines which traditional military tools can be applied to this nontraditional security threat and which new tools can be developed to address the implications of climate change for CENTCOM. The aim of this report is to help CENTCOM planners prepare for a future security environment that is affected by climate change. Even with preventive action, the command will face additional requirements from climate stress. To provide context for resource prioritization discussions, this report presents an analysis of the frequency and the conditions under which the United States has traditionally intervened militarily in the CENTCOM theater and rough order of magnitude costs of interventions by type. This report is the fifth and final in a series focused on climate change and the security environment."--

RAND researchers hosted a subject matter expert workshop, supplemented by an in-depth literature review, to determine proposed courses of action to reduce security threats from and meet international standards for prisons holding presumed former Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) fighters. The prisons are insecure and require physical reinforcements, otherwise they will continue to present a danger to the region and world given their potential for fueling an ISIS resurgence. Prisoners, including youth, remain in legal limbo with no internationally agreed-on justice procedures or specific legal charges, potentially leading to indefinite detention in poor living conditions. RAND's research and discussions revealed that the situation of the ISIS prisoners carries four problems and risks that can be mitigated through both short-term courses of action and medium-term policy directions.

The territorial defeat of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) left millions of Iraqi and Syrian civilians displaced, along with the families of Syrian, Iraqi, and foreign ISIS fighters. A significant share of the families of ISIS fighters resides in two internally displaced person camps located in northeastern Syria, al-Hol and Roj, intermingled with Syrian and Iraqi civilians. There are open questions about the futures of the residents of these camps and the implications of housing innocent, displaced residents alongside or adjacent to the families of ISIS fighters. One of the most significant challenges of this arrangement is the need to limit the spread of extremist ideology and ISIS recruitment among the children of ISIS fighters' families and other civilians. In this report, the authors examine the humanitarian and security conditions in these camps, address the potential impact on ISIS recruitment, and highlight critical challenges in the need to return these displaced residents to their home communities and countries. They also offer recommendations to improve living conditions in al-Hol and Roj, address the legal and judicial conundrums facing foreigners living in the camps, and mitigate the threat of radicalization from the residents within the camps.