1995-10-01a- CIA Conference Report: THE CHALLENGE OF ETHNIC CONFLICT TO NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL ORDER IN THE 1990S GEOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES 01-Oct-95

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Ethnic Conflict and US Policy involves an understanding that the notion of eco-
nomic prosperity abroad is an important component.
of US national security.
Wade Hinkle------
Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense - Ethnic and nationalconflict. Mr. Aspin clearly sees
for Policy Planning Department of Defense 1 this as one of the principal challenges to US national
security in the post-:Cold War era.
My task in the next eight minutes is to discuss ethnic
and national conflict and the US policy response to it. The United States is in the process of making substan-
Let me tell you what a difficult task it will be; it took tial reductions to its military forces and military bud-
more than eight minutes for the conference coordina- get. By the time the reductions envisioned in the
tors to describe to me what it was they wanted me to Clinton defense program have been implemented, we
cover. Nevertheless, let me take a shot at it. will have eliminated over 1 million people in uniform
and another quarter of a million civilians from the
Clearly, the last four years have been an exciting time Defense Department. We will have eliminated one-
to be a planner in defense and national security strat- quarter to one-third of our military forces, and defense
egy. I subscribe to what Dr. Gundersen said about the spending by the end of 1997 will be down to below
end of the Cold War being, in a military sense, the end 3.5 percent of gross domestic product-the lowest
of a very comfortable period of time, when the uni- level since 1939.
verse and its problems were well understood and well
bounded. I think, however, that we have made some From the perspective of the defense planner, one of
progress in the last four years in thinking through the main concerns in making reductions of that scale
these issues in the perspective of US national security. is the possibility that ethnic and national conflict may
I also think that Secretary of Defense Les Aspin made occur in ways that will challenge American and
a good start in his conceptualization of this problem defense interests. Some debate has occurred in my
by talking about what he called the four dangers to US field of conflict studies, about whether the demise of
national security in the post-Cold War era: the Cold War has increased or decreased the possibil-
ity of ethnic and national conflict.
e The new nuclear danger Partly an artifact of the
Cold War, this involves the security of the 30,000 to George Kohn's database on conflict shows that there
45,000 nuclear weapons that were present on former have been about three large-scale ethnic and national
Soviet territory when the Soviet Union broke up. conflicts per year since 1945. This rate did not tail off
Also it involves the possibility of weapons of mass as a result of the end of the Cold War. In terms of non-
destruction proliferating throughout the world. state conflict, there have been about nine serious eth-
nically motivated coup attempts each year since 1987.
- The dangerto democracy.This is the possibility of a
failure of reform in the former Soviet Union. But whether ethnic and national conflict is increasing
or simply remaining at high levels, it-clearly poses a
- The new economic danger.The Clinton Administra- danger not only to participants and nearby neighbors
tion believes that, without a robust and growing but also to us. This is either because the conflict is
economy in the United States, the United States will occurring in critical areas-as with the case in the
not be strong domestically and will be unable to be Persian Gulf-or because some of the participants
an effective actor internationally. This danger also are gaining access to increasingly deadlier and more
Dr. Hinkle has since left the government and is now a member of
the Institute for Defense Analyses.
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