Newsday (New York, NY) June 21, 2002
Grant Aids Prof's Study Of Military
By Olivia Winslow
A little more than a decade ago, it occurred to Ian Roxborough that with the end of the Cold War, an event dramatically illustrated by the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, significant change was in store for the American military.
For the organizational sociology professor at SUNY Stony Brook who had spent 20 years studying Latin American politics and labor management, those developments prompted him to change his research focus. Who did the American military see as the country's new enemies, he wanted to know, and how would military operations change as a result? Those questions are at the heart of Roxborough's current research, which recently got a significant boost when he was named a Carnegie Scholar last month, along with 10 other researchers at American universities, by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Awarded a $100,000 grant from the foundation, Roxborough said he will be working on two books exploring those issues.
In a recent interview in his Stony Brook office crammed with books and a few artifacts hinting at his field of study - a World War I-era U.S. helmet and a fallout shelter sign - Roxborough said, "When the Soviet Union went away, the U.S. military no longer had an obvious enemy. The interesting question is what would it do? ... Since Sept. 11, everybody's attention has been focused on terrorism. But I'm looking at the process that starts with the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and how American military strategists tried to think about the dangers and threats and opportunities. Terrorism only recently got on the agenda ... but there are many other issues that have come up."
Such research is important, said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense policy research group in Alexandria, Va. "It's important there be a number of independent voices looking at the military because it faces a greater diversity of threats today than it did during the Cold War." A case in point, he said, is U.S. relations with Pakistan.
"We're looking at them to help us with the war on terrorism, but we're mad at Pakistan because they've gotten nuclear weapons and we're worried about Pakistan because they might get into a nuclear war with India," Pike said. "We have a very complex set of security requirements with respect to Pakistan." But during the Cold War, "Pakistan helped us against the Soviet Union and that was all that mattered."
While everyone's attention these days is on terrorism, Roxborough said other threats "haven't gone away." They include, he said, Iraq and North Korea, considered "rogue states" by the U.S. government; and ethnic clashes around the world that raise the question of what role the United States should play in peacekeeping and humanitarian operations. Then there are "transnational criminal cartels, drug dealers and loose collections of individuals like al-Qaida."
These threats, Roxborough suggested, require a different military mindset. "The analogy I always use is a big oil tanker. The captain says turn left and 10 miles down the road, the ship starts to turn. It takes a long time to change a huge organization like the defense establishment."
He said the U.S. military has started turning course. "They're trying to become better at moving forces quickly to all parts of the world" and at being "more precise in the way they use military forces." Roxborough hopes his work will help "improve the way the American military thinks about change and changing roles."
Copyright 2002 Newsday, Inc.
