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1 1 (April 30, 2020)

handle is hein.crs/govdabq0001 and id is 1 raw text is: ,.........s. .er', - Se April 30, 2020 COVID-19: National Security and Defense Strategy The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted questions about U.S. national security and crisis preparedness. Inherent to those discussions are broader, foundational questions about how the United States government conceptualizes national security, and the currently held view by many of the relative prioritization of the Department of Defense (DOD) over other instruments of national power. While definitional debates often seem frustratingly obscure, their outcomes often have a significant bearing on the programs, priorities, and activities of the United States Government. In other words, how a problem is framed matters because those definitions directly affect how the government operates, including how it translates those concepts into the priorities that require primary attention and resources. Scholars and practitioners have long debated what, exactly, constitutes a security challenge, and what the role of the state should be in their management. The tension between traditional realist security and human security perspectives provides one example of how these debates can play out. Traditional analyses contended that security is synonymous with the mitigation of military risk and the effective deterrence-or prosecution-of warfare between states. In the 1990s, responding in part to genocides in Africa and the Balkans, as well as humanitarian and financial crises, some analysts widened the aperture for security studies. Human security, a concept of security that uses the individual as its referent point and focuses on the overall well-being of people within society, became another way that scholars and practitioners began evaluating security. Over time, issues such as access to health, impacts of climate change, food and energy security, and even to some extent counterinsurgency have become associated with the concept of human security. A key question for policymakers has been to what extent, if any, concepts and issues that have become associated with human security should be integrated into national security planning that is still to a significant degree based on updated versions of traditional security concepts. On one hand, some observers contend that human security is too broad to be useful for policy planning; if everything is a security priority, nothing is a security priority. Other practitioners, building on that point, argue that the expansive human security definition obscures the formidable defense challenges that adversaries around the globe pose through their military modernization investments. One example: analysts express concern that adversaries including Russia and China, and to a lesser extent Iran and North Korea, have invested in anti- access/area denial capabilities designed to limit U.S. freedom of action and therefore constrain America's ability to advance its interests around the globe. U.S. adversaries such as Russia and China are also modernizing their nuclear capabilities. According to this more traditional view, diluting the concept of security in defense planning risks the United States being unprepared for a major conflict, should it arise. Other observers respond that some human security approaches better reflect extant realities. As their logic goes, over the past 25 years, non-traditional security challenges such as the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, stability operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and pandemics including the 2016 Ebola outbreak and now COVID-19 have all commanded more U.S. attention and resources than conventional warfare with another nation-state. They argue that choosing to define security narrowly is choosing to ignore the challenges with which the U.S. government- and U.S. military-have had to contend, and are likely to have to do so in the future. E~r~U S. Cvc%rrnc z Oeft t of scz.rity The Obama Administration arguably used a more expansive definition of security in its strategy documents. Its 2010 National Security Strategy argued that key threats to the United States have evolved: Wars over ideology have given way to wars over religious, ethnic, and tribal identity; nuclear dangers have proliferated; inequality and economic instability have intensified; damage to our environment, food insecurity, and dangers to public health are increasingly shared; and the same tools that empower individuals to build enable them to destroy. The Trump Administration, by contrast, chose to focus the national security agenda on strategic competition, primarily with key adversarial states: China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity. They are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence. At the same time, the dictatorships of the democratic People's Republic of Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran are determined to destabilize regions, threaten Americans and our allies, and brutalize their own people. Transnational threat groups, from jihadist terrorists to transnational criminal organizations, are actively trying to harm Americans. Preventing China and Russian from developing military capabilities superior to those of the U.S. and creating M 1 10 LU

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