With budgetary constraints looming and global priorities shifting, the U.S. military is in the process of pursuing leaner and more adaptive ways to achieve U.S. national security objectives around the globe. This effort is in accordance with the Department of Defense’s (DOD) 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance (.pdf), which recognizes the need for the military to rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region and sustain its focus on the Middle East, while maintaining current defense commitments in other parts of the world. One of the new approaches being developed is the Regionally Aligned Brigade concept, through which each regional combatant command (COCOM) would [...]
President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina recently led a trade mission to Angola to push for a food-for-oil deal with the oil-rich southern African country. In an email interview, Vasco Martins, an affiliated researcher at the Portuguese Institute of International Relations and Security, discussed Angola’s external relations. WPR: What are the main domestic and international factors driving Angola’s external relations? Vasco Martins: Angola’s domestic interests seem to reside above all in assuring continuing funding for its national reconstruction program in order to enhance the provision of services in several areas and to extend state administration throughout its territory, especially [...]
RUBAVU COUNTY, Rwanda — Like most of those seeking refuge at the Nkamira Transit Center, Queen Maombi has a harrowing tale of escape from her native Democratic Republic of Congo. Maombi, 34, is one of nearly 9,000 Congolese that have overwhelmed this temporary camp since April, when a fresh wave of violence hit eastern Congo’s long restive North Kivu province. Like Maombi, nearly all of the new arrivals are Congolese by birth but ethnically Rwandan — a distinction that effectively branded them enemies of the state following a mutiny against the Congolese army by soldiers loyal to Gen. Bosco Ntaganda, [...]
