Simons Center News

The Academic Year 2020 CGSC Foundation and DACOR Visiting Professor of Diplomacy, Career Minister (Ret.) Ambassador Katherine Canavan conducted her fall term visit Dec. 2-6, 2019. Her visit included meeting in a variety of forums with more than 300 students and faculty from the Command and General Staff School, the School of Advanced Military Studies, […]

Featured article: Very Small Satellites: A Mechanism for the Early Detection of Mass Atrocities by Dani Redmon Swarms of blue-winged butterflies greedily cling to the tall, white, weedy beauty of the Artemisia vulgaris plant. However, beneath this carpet of alluring flora in the foothills surrounding the town of Srebrenica, Bosnia, hides an ugly secret: The earth below […]

Featured article: Enabling Tax Payments: A Novel Approach to Reducing Violence and Poverty in El Salvador by Ann Low Poorly organized governments collect insufficient revenue to pay for police forces and civil administrations whose staff are consistently well trained, highly motivated, and immune from bribery. Inadequate tax collections generate weak institutions and insufficient policing, leading to insecure areas […]

Mr. Larry A. Hisle, the executive director of the Greater Kansas City Federal Executive Board (FEB), spoke about the many, many programs of the Greater Kansas City FEB during the InterAgency Brown-Bag Lecture conducted Nov. 26, 2019, in the Lewis and Clark Center’s Arnold Conference Room. Hisle briefly touched on the FEB’s history before diving into it’s […]

Featured article: The Economics of Trade and National Security by David A. Anderson In an increasingly globalized world, trade and economic displacement issues, geopolitics and national security concerns has become intertwined creating a multitude of possible friction points between state actors, international financial institutions and trade organizations. Left to their own devises these factors may slow trade and […]

Featured article: Team of Rivals: Building Civil-Military Synergy in the Interagency by Jeffrey S. Han In the summer of 2009, in the aftermath of the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, I deployed as a newly-minted, active duty, Army civil affairs officer to Sri Lanka. The challenges at the time—widespread destruction of infrastructure, landmines embedded […]

Featured article: Defeating the Taliban’s Shadow Government: A Foreign Internal Governance Strategy by Daniel R. Green As the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIRoA) assumes greater control of its sovereignty and the U.S. presence in Afghanistan diminishes, the ability of Special Operations Forces (SOF) to exercise positive political influence on both GIRoA and […]

As part of the Foundation’s Distinguished Speaker Series, Brent Geary, Ph.D., historian with the Central Intelligence Agency and the Center for the Study of Intelligence, presented a lecture titled, “Very Secret, Very Cool, but not Aliens: The U-2, the A-12 and Area 51,” to over 50 attendees at Park University on Wednesday, Oct. 30. His […]

Featured article: The Influence of Transhumanist Thought on Human Enhancement by Jeff Sheets In the April 2017 edition of National Geographic Magazine, journalist D.T. Max describes his encounter with cyborg Neil Harbisson. Color blind from birth due to a condition called achromatopsia, Harbisson had a fiber-optic sensor fixed onto the back of his skull. This […]

Featured article: Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Autonomous Weapon Systems and the Laws of Armed Conflict by Dustin P.J. Murphy Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the world and it will change the nature, speed, and scope of war. AI promises to benefit humanity but it also generates fear because of the unknowns associated with its advancement, especially the potential of […]