Research Committee
Committees » Research

The Director of Research is Peter Barshschdorff.

CENSA works to contribute to the national security debate by providing a collaborative vehicle and a public platform for its members. Both sides of this process are critical to CENSA's mission: 1) empowering diverse members to sharpen their national security analysis through focused collaboration with each other, and 2) injecting this thinking back into the national security debate. CENSA's model allows the regular incorporation of ideas from members at the cutting edge of government, industry, and academic innovation into security analysis. CENSA then provides the platform to place this analysis in the public forum where it can be viewed, critiqued, and incorporated by mainstream policy actors and organizations. CENSA provides a focused range of opportunities for policy development and intellectual discovery that is responsive to time constraints of a mid-career membership.

In its first year of existence, CENSA has demonstrated the success of several pilot models of its products. Each of the programs below has been implemented under a "zero-funding" environment.

 

Externally Focused Projects

CENSA's research is organized around task forces - both short-term and long-term - focused on specific research objectives. Task forces examine new and existing policy issues, suggest possible courses of action, and strive to inject innovative ideas and solutions into the US policymaking process. Each task force consists of a multi-disciplinary team, drawing upon the breadth of CENSA membership expertise.

CENSA's research agenda will take place on three levels. The group will maintain a leading voice in current debates on national security by supporting members' interests in writing and publishing op-eds, letters and other such short works. These will target the national press but CENSA will also seek a presence in the locales in which our members reside. In winter 2002, CENSA will establish a periodic memorandum series with 4-8 page pieces that examine specific national security issues in greater depth. These will be made available electronically and in paper form. Finally, CENSA teams will engage in ongoing, long-term projects that produce lasting, probing works on larger issues. These reports will target the elite foreign policy community with runs of several hundred to athousand copies each.

 

Research Case Study: Presidential Transition Report

In November 2000, CENSA released Passing the Torch - Recommendations to the Next President on Emerging National Security Issues. This compendium, developed through electronic collaboration among a bipartisan group of CENSA members, contained 27 individual memoranda providing analysis and recommendations to the next President on emerging security issues of the next five to twenty years that will require his focus. In the six months after its release, CENSA distributed over 200 hard copies to senior officials throughout the national security structure, received over 78,000 hits on its web site, and had more than 800 downloads of our internet version. The compendium was reported to have been reviewed by the new National Security Advisor in January 2001. This project was undertaken without a single face-to-face meeting of authors/task force participants, serving as a pilot for CENSA's virtual collaboration model of research across professional boundaries and across the globe.

 

Competitive Grant-supported Project: "Evaluating the Effectiveness of Engagement"

CENSA seeks to carry out the first objective, in-depth review of the effectiveness of engagement strategies and tactics. The team is seeking major foundation funding to allow CENSA to bring together some two dozen analysts from the U.S., East Asia, and Southwest Asia for a series of conferences and the production of a major book. In addition to establishing CENSA as a major voice on a fundamental aspect of U.S. foreign policy, this project will promote a CENSA-based international network of young analysts.

 

Collaborative Issue Groups

CENSA collaborative projects bring together active field professionals to focus intellectual effort on specific issue areas. These projects accomplish their mission by producing timely articles and analyses, disseminating information on its website, and sponsoring events for the national security community.

 

Collaboration Case Study: Program on Innovation and National Security (PINS)

The goal of the initial project, PINS, is to study and contribute to the debate on the changing role of innovation and technology in national security. The team has launched a web page and discussion group under the CENSA site and sponsored an evening of the CENSA dinner series. PINS' next product will be a collaborative volume released in Winter 2002.