A method of assessing the quality of pharmaceutical market and industry reports as a source to study access to medicines

This repository item contains a single issue of the Health and Development Discussion Papers, an informal working paper series that began publishing in 2002 by the Boston University Center for Global Health and Development. It is intended to help the Center and individual authors to disseminate work that is being prepared for journal publication or that is not appropriate for journal publication but might still have value to readers.Market and industry reports can be useful in studying access to medicines from a pharmaceutical market perspective. However, many market and industry reports lack some or much of the information required to conduct analyses to study access to medicines and are often not transparent in their data sources and research methodologies. The instrument developed in this study, titled the Pharmaceutical Market and Industry Report Assessment Tool (PIRAT), assesses the quality of pharmaceutical market and industry reports, specifically focusing on the needs of public health researchers, and includes criteria describing the content and quality of the market reports. The assessment tool generates an unweighted score indicating the relative strengths and weaknesses of reports

Ethics and the Return to Strategy

Today there is a return to strategy in the foreign and defense policies of the United States and its allies. Strategy’s return has been prompted by the need to make decisions about when, where and how to use force to deter, disrupt and destroy individuals, groups and states that seek to upset the spread of democracy and free markets. Because force is now being considered not just to deter war, but also to wage war, there is a need to reconsider the ethical challenges created by the return of strategy. These challenges will manifest in a variety of ways, but they are likely to fall heavily on elected officials and military professionals as they grapple with terrorism and other unconventional forms of warfare and integrate new technologies into traditional force structures

Counter proliferation, conventional counterforce and Nuclear War

The article of record as published may be found at https://doi.org/10.1080/0140239000843777

Introduction, David Sherman’s ‘William Friedman and Pearl Harbor’: A Symposium

The article of record as published may be found at https://doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2017.140022

The Cyber Pearl Harbor redux: helpful analogy or cyber hype?

The article of record as published may be found at https://doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2018.1460087This article defends the utility of employing the Pearl Harbor analogy to characterize contemporary cyber threats, especially threats facing the United States. It suggests that despite the fact that policy-makers are keenly aware of the nature of today’s cyber threats, this knowledge does not necessarily protect them from falling victim to a strategically significant cyber surprise attack. The fact that elected officials and senior officers fall victim to strategic surprise attacks launched by known adversaries is the problematique that animates the study of intelligence failure. The article concludes with the observation that just because scholars and policy-makers can imagine a ‘Cyber Pearl Harbor’ does not guarantee that they can avoid a Cyber Pearl Harbor

Ground alert for looking glass: SAC's new emphasis on strategic warning

The article of record as published may be found at https://doi.org/10.1080/0743017910840548

Miscalculation, surprise and American intelligence after the cold war

The article of record as published may be found at https://doi.org/10.1080/0885060910843516

Life in the “Gray Zone”: observations for contemporary strategists

The article of record as published may be found at https://doi.org/10.1080/14751798.2017.1310702The term “Gray Zone” is gaining in popularity as a way of describing contemporary security challenges. This article describes the “short- of-war” strategies – the fait accompli, proxy warfare, and the exploitation of ambiguous deterrence situations, i.e. “salami tactics” – that are captured by the term and offers several explanations for why state and non-state actors are drawn to these strategies. The analysis highlights why defense postures based on deterrence are especially vulnerable to the short-of-war strategies that populate the “Gray Zone.” The article concludes by suggesting how defense officials might adapt defense policies to life in the “Gray Zone.