Stephanie Leutert, Director of the Central America and Mexico Policy Initiative at the Strauss Center, recently authored an article for the national security law blog Lawfare. In her article “One County, 650 Migrant Deaths: An Introduction,” she introduces a series of essays on the deaths of 650 people in Brooks County, Texas, between 2009 and 2019 while attempting to circumvent a nearby Customs and Border Protection checkpoint. 

Joshua Busby, Distinguished Scholar at the Strauss Center for International Security and Law, co-edited an essay collection for a CFR publication titled Impact of Climate Risk on the Energy System. In his essay, “A Clear and Present Danger: Climate Risks, the Energy System, and U.S. National Security”, Busby argues the severity and speed of climate change constitutes a national security threat. He argues that policymakers ought to consider the national security implications of climate change across a host of issues, not solely its effects on military capacity. In the US context, he identifies four national security threats which could result from climate change impacts on energy systems, namely: 1) power outages in communities near military bases which in turn disrupt electricity and other services on site at military bases (2) risks of power outages in communities that require military mobilization for domestic humanitarian emergencies (3) risks of cascading negative effects on other systems dependent upon electricity such as hospitals, transportation, and information as a result of damages at home from climate change related hazards and (4) risks of international cascading effects if important parts of the energy supply chain are affected by climate impacts internationally. He concludes by providing four recommendations for policymakers and further identifying the types of analytical assessments which further research could undertake to establish a more comprehensive analysis of the national security implications of climate change. Read the full collection of essays here.

The Strauss Center and Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin (UT) and the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), in association with the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), are pleased to invite you to submit an abstract for the Space Traffic Management Conference to be held on February 19-20, 2020, in Austin TX, USA. 

In an Intelligence Studies Essay on the Lawfare national security site, LBJ School alumnus and former Brumley Graduate Fellow Eric Manpearl and ISP Director Steve Slick call for a reappraisal of Obama-era policies that afford extraordinary privacy protections to incidentally collected data on foreign nationals.  The authors argue that the security costs of these legacy restrictions on US signals intelligence activity outweigh the diplomatic benefits of voluntarily extending universal privacy rights to citizens of both allied and adversarial states.   The essay recommends a full policy review leading to repeal of relevant provisions in Presidential Policy Directive-28 or, at a minimum, amendments to the Directive that would require foreign governments that desire such protections for their citizens to respect the privacy of Americans in equal measure.  The full essay is here.