United States of America (USA)

India should seek a regional solution to the Afghan conflict, involving a regional force under a UN flag to provide a stable environment for governance and development till the Afghan National Army can take over.

The paralysis at the Conference on Disarmament (CD) captures the state of affairs that has bedevilled the field of arms control/disarmament during the last 10 years.

While the Chinese president’s trip concluded with a joint statement and the signing of trade and investment deals, it achieved little in terms of addressing pressing global problems and bilateral issues.

Primarily because of the uncertainties surrounding US-China relations, the Hu-Obama summit ended in a stalemate with both leaders agreeing to disagree on important matters.

The defence diplomacy of the United States in the midst of the current war against terror in Afghanistan is designed towards ending the US military operations without ceding total authority to the Taliban. The US-led international coalition of forces, that include NATO forces, have failed to crush the Taliban. On the other hand, Taliban have been unable to force the external forces to quit Afghanistan. The US does not want to quit without the assurance that no second 9/11 takes place.

Gates has steered Japan and South Korea towards aligning their shared threat perceptions about North Korea and China.

After Lisbon, the next step for NATO and Russia should be addressing issues relating to deployments of arsenals and arms control.

The durability of the New START will depend largely on how both sides value it as a means towards disarmament rather than for strategic competition.

This paper makes an attempt to analyse and evaluate the US Department of Defence Acquisition System by highlighting the relationship of the requirements generation and budgeting process, the key actors, the major phases in an acquisition programme, and the major categories of acquisitions. It argues that the Department of Defence Acquisition System represents an ever evolving system-of-systems that attempts to translate Warfighter requirements into actual developed, purchased and fielded systems.

Seth G. Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010, pp. 430, ISBN 978-0-393-33851-5 (paperback

Forrest E. Morgan, C. Christine Fair, Keith Crane, Christopher S. Chivvis, Samir Puri, and Michael Spirtas, Can United States Secure an Insecure State , RAND Corporation, US, 2010, pp. 232, ISBN 978-0-8330-4807-3 (paperback)