Ecuador: The Continuing Challenge of Democratic Consolidation and Civil-Military Relations; Strategic Insights, v. 5, issue 2 (February 2006)

This article appeared in Strategic Insights, v.5, issue 2 (February 2006)Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

The Center for Civil-Military Relations / Spanish Case Study

The Center for Civil-Military Relations at the Naval Post-Graduate School (CCMR, Monterey, CA) is an implementing organization of the U.S. Department of Defense's Expanded-International Military Education and Training Program and has amassed both scholarly and practical expertise educating civilian and military defense professionals from more than 40 countries. CCMR was established in 1994 and is sponsored by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA). CCMR conducts civil-military relations programs designed primarily for military officers, civilian officials, legislators, and non-government personnel. These programs include courses designed to be taught both in residence at NPS and in a Mobile Education Team (MET) format, depending upon requirements. Three programs offered by CCMR include the MET, the Masters Degree in International Security and Civil-Military Relations, and the Executive Program in Civil-Military Relations.The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) sponsored the research in this report under agreement AEP-A-00-98-00014-00, which established the Partnership for Democratic Governance and Society. The Partnership for Democratic Governance and Society (PDGS) conducts programs to strengthen the capacity of civilians to provide leadership in defense management, policymaking and analysis. The PDGS conducts its programs in cooperation with local legislatures, political parties, civic organizations, academic institutions, media and the civilian elements of the defense establishment.Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Putting the Military Back into Civil-Military Relations

There is no region in the world that exceeds Latin America in the number of books and articles, by local and foreign scholars, on the topic of civil-military relations. It is indicative of the great interest in the topic that Red de Seguridad y Defensa de América Latina (RESDAL), based in Buenos Aires, periodically publishes the Defense Atlas of Latin America and the Caribbean, which appears in Spanish but has also appeared in English and at least once in French. Despite serious and sustained efforts and interest in other regions, particularly in the Middle East, there is nothing similar anywhere else in the world. Currently, much is happening in both the United States and Latin America involving civil-military relations, for better and for worse. The value of several of these books is to redirect our attention at least in part back to the military institutions from which the currently democratic regimes evolved. The authors deal with fundamental issues of militaries including the centrality of strategy, the importance of roles and missions, and the necessity of institutions in the absence of which civilians are incapable of controlling the military. It must be stated up front that two major factors influence most of the literature on civil-military relations in the region, both of which revolve around the military but normally do not enter into military issues per se. First is the very serious human rights abuses in virtually all of the countries ruled by military regimes, and second, the transition from military regimes to electoral democracies, again in virtually all of the countries. It is no surprise, then, that the overwhelming emphasis in the literature is on the conditions for, and institutions created to exercise democratic civilian control, with very little attention to the military itself. The question thus arises: What happened to the military in civil-military relations in Latin America? The great novelty, and in my view, contribution of at least five of the books reviewed here is that they focus on precisely the military as an institution, how it should be organized, how it should be led, and what it should be doing: Chirio’s in her focus on the internal dynamics of the military in Brazil, Pion-Berlin’s as he focuses on roles or missions, Alsina’s as he deals with national security and defense strategy, Pion-Berlin and Martínez as they analyze military effectiveness, and Franqui-Rivera as he focuses on the military’s role in the culture in Puerto Rico. Each of these books, by refocusing the debate on the military institutions and their missions, brings the military back into the study of civil-military relations. While the book by Klein and Vidal Luna focuses mainly on the military regime, 1964–1985, and Chirio’s on the military regime and democratic transition, the remaining six deal primarily with the military in democratic regimes

Portugal: Problems and Prospects in the Creation of a New Regime

If the overwhelming majority of foreign observers were surprised but encouraged by the coup of 25 April 1974 which signaled an end to the Salazar· Caetano regime, the responses to developments since that time have been mixed. In part this ambivalence can be attributed to the developments them• selves which are both difficult to comprehend and almost impossible to place in a fixed context. Indeed, there is no fixed context

A political transition in Chile, problems and prospects on the long road to democracy

http://archive.org/details/politicaltransit00brunN

Are the Maras Overwhelming Governments in Central America?

Military Review, November - December 2006Violence in Central America has grown so much in the last half decade that Colombia is no longer the homicide capital of the region. In fact, it now ranks fourth in that ignominious distinction behind El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.1 The violence is mostly due to the phenomenon of street gangs, also called pandillas or gangas, but most often maras. They have grown in number, sophistication, and stature and have largely overwhelmed the security forces of Central America’s fledgling democracies. Altogether, these maras represent a significant threat to the security of the countries in the region. Numerous national, binational, multinational, regional, and hemispheric conferences have sought to address the problem

The military coup in Mali, 22 March 2012, reflections on the demise of democracy and the importance of civil-military relations

The coup in Bamako, on 22 March 2012 both gave lie to the apparent stability of Mali as a democratic country and resulted in the taking of power of an assortment of armed combatants in the North of the country, which resulted in armed intervention by France. This article is about the coup itself that created the power vacuum allowing the insurrection to grow and ultimately take power in the North. The authors have developed a framework for analyzing civil-military relations they believe is more useful than other available frameworks in understanding the role of the military in politics

Quad-Chip Double-Balanced Frequency Tripler

Solid-state frequency multipliers are used to produce tunable broadband sources at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths. The maximum power produced by a single chip is limited by the electrical breakdown of the semiconductor and by the thermal management properties of the chip. The solution is to split the drive power to a frequency tripler using waveguides to divide the power among four chips, then recombine the output power from the four chips back into a single waveguide. To achieve this, a waveguide branchline quadrature hybrid coupler splits a 100-GHz input signal into two paths with a 90 relative phase shift. These two paths are split again by a pair of waveguide Y-junctions. The signals from the four outputs of the Y-junctions are tripled in frequency using balanced Schottky diode frequency triplers before being recombined with another pair of Y-junctions. A final waveguide branchline quadrature hybrid coupler completes the combination. Using four chips instead of one enables using four-times higher power input, and produces a nearly four-fold power output as compared to using a single chip. The phase shifts introduced by the quadrature hybrid couplers provide isolation for the input and output waveguides, effectively eliminating standing waves between it and surrounding components. This is accomplished without introducing the high losses and expense of ferrite isolators. A practical use of this technology is to drive local oscillators as was demonstrated around 300 GHz for a heterodyne spectrometer operating in the 2-3-THz band. Heterodyne spectroscopy in this frequency band is especially valuable for astrophysics due to the presence of a very large number of molecular spectral lines. Besides high-resolution radar and spectrographic screening applications, this technology could also be useful for laboratory spectroscopy

IL28B SNP screening and distribution in the French Canadian population using a rapid PCR-based test

Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the proximity of the interleukin-28B (IL28B) gene can predict spontaneous resolution of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection and response to interferon therapy. Screening for this polymorphism has become part of the standard criteria for the management of HCV-infected patients, hence the need for a rapid, cost-effective screening method. Here, we describe a rapid PCR-based test to screen for two IL28B SNPs (rs12979860 and rs8099917). We used this test to investigate IL28B polymorphism and prevalence in a cohort of French Canadian injection drug users who are part of a unique population known to have a strong genetic founder effect. This population had lower linkage disequilibrium between the two tested SNPs as compared to other cohorts (|d′| = 0.68, r = 0.59). The special genetic makeup should be considered in the management of HCV-infected patients within that population