In addition to port security, ship inspection and safety, law enforcement, and search and rescue, the U.S. Coast Guard assumes an important role in national defense at home and abroad. To that end, the Coast Guard has carried out separate and coordinated missions with other armed forces from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf of Mexico, Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, and North Polar region. This chronicle of the Coast Guard's contributions to national defense examines participation in World War I, World War II, Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam, and the War on Terror. Among the topics explored are defense threats, drug trafficking, and border security, as well as Coast Guard personnel, training, leadership, and assets.

An ethics handbook for a profession unlike any other

On August 24-25, 2010, the National Defense University held a conference titled “Economic Security: Neglected Dimension of National Security?” to explore the economic element of national power. This special collection of selected papers from the conference represents the view of several keynote speakers and participants in six panel discussions. It explores the complexity surrounding this subject and examines the major elements that, interacting as a system, define the economic component of national security.

An insider's account of America's ineffectual approach to some of the hardest defense and intelligence issues in the three decades since the Cold War ended. Insanity can be defined as doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result. As a nation, America has cycled through the same defense and intelligence issues since the end of the Cold War. In Insanity Defense, Congresswoman Jane Harman chronicles how four administrations have failed to confront some of the toughest national security policy issues and suggests achievable fixes that can move us toward a safer future. The reasons for these inadequacies are varied and complex, in some cases going back generations. American leaders didn’t realize soon enough that the institutions and habits formed during the Cold War were no longer effective in an increasingly multi-power world transformed by digital technology and riven by ethno-sectarian conflict. Nations freed from the fear of the Soviets no longer deferred to America as before. Yet the United States settled into a comfortable, at times arrogant, position as the lone superpower. At the same time our governing institutions, which had stayed resilient, however imperfectly, through multiple crises, began their own unraveling. Congresswoman Harman was there—as witness, legislator, exhorter, enabler, dissident and, eventually, outside advisor and commentator. Insanity Defense is an insider’s account of decades of American national security—of its failures and omissions—and a roadmap to making significant progress on solving these perennially difficult issues.

In 1950, when he commissioned the first edition of The Armed Forces Officer, Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall told its author, S.L.A. Marshall, that "American military officers, of whatever service, should share common ground ethically and morally." In this new edition, the authors methodically explore that common ground, reflecting on the basics of the Profession of Arms, and the officer's special place and distinctive obligations within that profession and especially to the Constitution.