In December 2009, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy conducted a day-long simulation of the diplomatic and military fallout that could result from an Israeli military strike against the Iranian nuclear program. In this Middle East Memo, Kenneth M. Pollack analyzes the critical decisions each side made during the wargame.

The simulation was conducted as a three-move game with three separate country teams. One team represented a hypothetical American National Security Council, a second team represented a hypothetical Israeli cabinet, and a third team represented a hypothetical Iranian Supreme National Security Council. The U.S. team consisted of approximately ten members, all of whom had served in senior positions in the U.S. government and U.S. military. The Israel team consisted of a half-dozen American experts on Israel with close ties to Israeli decision-makers, and who, in some cases, had spent considerable time in Israel. Some members of the Israel team had also served in the U.S. government. The Iran team consisted of a half-dozen American experts on Iran, some of whom had lived and/or traveled extensively in Iran, are of Iranian extraction, and/or had served in the U.S. government with responsibility for Iran.

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As the United States readies to assume chairmanship of the Arctic Council today, it is timely to assess where the United States stands in terms of its ability and commitment to lead in the region. While there are many important elements of Arctic leadership outlined in the U.S. National Arctic Strategy, the ultimate metric of state leadership comes not from policy alone but also willingness to commit the resources needed to advance national interests and shape favorable global norms for peace, stability, and responsibility. In this context, the United States has yet to demonstrate a strong commitment to 21st century Arctic leadership. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the decaying state of the U.S. heavy icebreaking “fleet”—currently consisting of just one operational heavy icebreaker—and the lack of a credible national strategy to expand, much less sustain, this capacity.

Although the Arctic Council framework focuses specifically on shared, non-military interests, it would be a mistake to assume the region will be immune from future incidents, whether from eventual increases in tourism and shipping, energy development, or even limited geopolitical conflict. The United States must sustain heavy icebreaking capability to assure year-round access to the region and to be ready to respond in the event of a safety, security, or environmental threat.

Commercial activity in the Arctic

While commercial activity in the Arctic remains limited today, signs of increased economic investment are on the rise, including Royal Dutch Shell’s announcement of intent to resume Arctic drilling later this year and Crystal Cruises’ planned 2016 traverse of the Northwest Passage with its 820 foot, 1,000 passenger cruise ship Crystal Serenity. The Arctic’s vast untapped resources and opening sea lanes are beginning to drive previously-unheard of levels of human activity.

Some have suggested companies like Shell can and will invest in their own icebreaking and emergency response capabilities for Arctic drilling, rendering a U.S. government asset superfluous. This is a shortsighted view that fails to recognize the fundamental risks associated with abdicating prevention and response capabilities solely to the private sector.

While a single icebreaker obviously has neither the capacity nor capability to clean up a large oil spill in the Arctic, or anywhere else for that matter, in certain scenarios it could help prevent a spill from happening in the first place, mitigate the severity of a spill, and provide a means to ensure on-scene government oversight and command of any incident.

In the case of Arctic tourism, it is important to recognize that a mass rescue operation involving hundreds of passengers on a cruise ship—already one of the most difficult scenarios for search and rescue professionals—becomes exponentially more difficult in the remote and harsh Arctic environment.

Finally, although unlikely in the near-term, a future scenario can also be envisioned in which U.S. Navy surface ships need access to the Arctic, and icebreaking capacity is necessary to execute the mission. This is perhaps a distant possibility in the context of today’s Arctic but is a contingency for which the nation should be prepared in the future.

Access to the polar regions

The Coast Guard’s nearly 40-year old and recently reactivated Polar Star is the only U.S. icebreaker with the size and horsepower to provide unfettered access to the polar regions. The reactivation of this vessel, built in the 1970s, cost nearly $60 million and is estimated to have extended its lifetime by only 7 to 10 years. This presents a difficult and unique challenge in an emergency; if for example, the aging Polar Star has a machinery failure and gets stuck in the ice, the United States does not have the means to extract it and may have to resort to assistance from a foreign country. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Paul Zukunft recently put it bluntly, saying the Coast Guard “has no self-rescue for its Arctic mission, for its Antarctic mission."

While dozens of small and medium sized icebreakers operate successfully in other parts of the world, heavy icebreakers—generally classified as those that exceed 45,000 horsepower—are needed to assure unrestricted access to the Arctic at any time of the year. Additionally, for the United States, heavy icebreaking capacity is also needed for missions like the annual resupply of McMurdo Station in Antarctica, an operation sponsored by the National Science Foundation and executed by the Coast Guard.

Sustaining the capability to access any region of the globe has been a fundamental tenet of U.S. national security policy for decades, and the Arctic should be no exception. The United States is falling behind other Arctic nations, like Russia, that have demonstrated an enduring commitment to maintaining access to the Arctic with heavy icebreakers.

These investments may be considered consistent with the size of Russia’s Arctic coastline and associated Exclusive Economic Zone, both of which are substantially larger than those of the United States or any other Arctic Nation. Indeed, there is certainly room to debate how many heavy icebreakers the United States will ultimately need in the future. A 2011 Coast Guard study concluded that meeting the tenets of the 2010 Naval Operations Concept—which calls for constant, year-round presence in both polar regions—would require six heavy and four medium icebreakers. Likewise, the study indicated three heavy and three medium icebreakers are needed for Arctic presence. Putting the debate in perspective, the Obama administration’s special representative for the Arctic, retired Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Robert Papp, recently gave a keynote address at the Brookings Institution stressing that “we should at least build one,” acknowledging the critical state of U.S. capability.

Replacing the Polar Star presents a unique challenge. Such vessels have not been built in four decades in the United States, and most estimates suggest a 10-year, $1 billion program to build just one in a U.S. shipyard under the federal government’s arduous acquisitions process. This places delivery of a new heavy icebreaker beyond the Polar Star’s remaining service life and adds to the urgency of the current situation.

U.S. engagement in the Arctic

In short, the United States must have the ability to access and engage in the polar regions on its own terms. No entity is better positioned to fulfill this national security imperative than the United States Coast Guard, which has the authority and organizational ethos to advance high latitude safety, security, and environmental interests without a corresponding threat of excessive militarization. The Coast Guard also remains one of few governmental entities capable of collaborative engagement with the Russians, built on years of maritime cooperation with their border guard.

While the case for icebreaker investment is clear, the Coast Guard lacks the resources to move forward on its own. For the Coast Guard, a new icebreaker is at best a distant runner-up to other recapitalization imperatives within the chronically underfunded service. The Coast Guard’s Medium Endurance Cutters are the cornerstone of the service’s offshore presence in the Western Hemisphere and are even older than the icebreakers. Replacing these 1960s-era cutters is justifiably the service’s top acquisition priority. The question here is not whether the Coast Guard wants new icebreaking capability, but rather how a new icebreaker stacks up against other, more urgent priorities in the context of current budget constraints.

The most appropriate funding solution is one that reflects the full breadth of inherently governmental interests in the Arctic, including safety, security, environmental protection, facilitation of maritime commerce and responsible economic development, national defense, and scientific research. In other words: funding from across the government to deliver a national, multi-mission asset.

The United States is considered an “Arctic Nation,” a term proudly used by policymakers to highlight our intrinsic national interests in the region and a profoundly basic yet important acknowledgement that Alaska and its associated territory above the Arctic Circle are indeed part of the United States. Unfortunately, the United States has yet to advance from this most basic construct of high latitude stakeholder to a proactive leadership and investment posture for the future. Not because of a lack of “skin in the game,” the United States has a legacy of well-documented interests in the Arctic, but a lack of consensus to make it a national priority in the context of the current budget environment.

Whether via national crisis or a comprehensive budget deal, polar icebreakers must eventually become the subject of serious resource discussions, and should ultimately garner broad bipartisan support. At that time, additional funding should be appropriated to the Coast Guard to support the acquisition of the much-needed heavy icebreakers, but not at the expense of its other, more pressing recapitalization programs. Until then, let’s be more realistic about our ability and commitment to lead in the Arctic.

In recent months, we’ve heard a lot about the tech industry's gender gap. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women represent just 19.7 percent of software developers, an occupation with a median salary of over $92,000 a year.

Women’s underrepresentation in these and other well-paying tech jobs is a major concern given that women still earn only 78 cents for every dollar earned by men. Meanwhile, labor shortages in software development and other high-skill occupations have tech companies worried about whether they’ll be able to grow as fast as they’d like.

Seattle’s Ada Developers Academy takes aim at both challenges. This highly selective, tuition-free program prepares women students to be full-stack software developers, meaning that they can do both front-end—what the user sees—and back-end—what’s behind the scenes that makes everything work properly. Prior experience in tech isn’t necessary to earn a spot at Ada: The main prerequisite is a strong desire to pursue a career in software development.

Ada combines six months of intensive classroom instruction with a six-month internship at a sponsoring company so that students have the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned in real-world situations. Sponsoring companies—which currently include Nordstrom, Redfin, Zillow and Expedia, among others—also benefit from the internships, which provide direct access to prospective employees at a time when proficient software developers can be hard to find.

If Ada’s first cohort is any indication, the academy’s combination of rigorous in-class training and hands-on work experience has tremendous value on the job market. All 15 members of the inaugural class got job offers for software developer positions before they graduated from the program.

It is estimated that there are 95 mobile phone subscriptions per 100 inhabitants worldwide, and this boom has not been lost on the developing world, where the number of mobile users has also grown at rocket speed. In fact, in recent years the information communication technology (ICT) revolution has provided opportunities leading to “death of distance,” allowing many obstacles to better livelihoods, especially for those in remote regions, to disappear. Remarkably, though, the huge proportion of poverty-stricken populations in so many of those same regions persists.

How might, then, we think differently on the relationship between these two ideas? Can and how might ICTs act as an engine for eradicating poverty and improving the quality of life in terms of better livelihoods, strong education outcomes, and quality health? Do today's communication technologies hold such potential?

In particular, the mobile phone’s accessibility and use creates and provides us with an unprecedented volume of data on social interactions, mobility, and more. So, we ask: Can this data help us better understand, characterize, and alleviate poverty?

Mapping call data records, mobility, and economic activity

The first step towards alleviating poverty is to generate poverty maps. Currently, poverty maps are created using nationally representative household surveys, which require manpower and time. Such maps are generated at a coarse regional resolution and continue to lag for countries in sub-Saharan Africa compared to the rest of the world.

As call data records (CDRs) allow a view of the communication and mobility patterns of people at an unprecedented scale, we show how this data can be used to create much more detailed poverty maps efficiently and at a finer spatial resolution. Such maps will facilitate improved diagnosis of poverty and will assist public policy planners in initiating appropriate interventions, specifically at the decentralized level, to eradicate human poverty and ensure a higher quality of life.

In order to create these detailed poverty maps, we first define the virtual network of a country as a “who-calls-whom” network. This signifies the macro-level view of connections or social ties between people, dissemination of information or knowledge, or dispersal of services. As calls are placed for a variety of reasons, including request for resources, information dissemination, personal etc., CDRs provide an interesting way to construct a virtual network for Senegal.

We start by quantifying the accessibility of mobile connectivity in Senegal, both spatially and across the population, using the CDR data. This quantification measures the amount of communication across various regions in Senegal. The result is a virtual network for Senegal, which is depicted in Figure 1. The circles in the map correspond to regional capitals, and the edges correspond to volume of mobile communication between them. Thicker edges mean higher volume of communication. Bigger circles mean heavier incoming and outgoing communication for that region.

Figure 1: Virtual network for Senegal with MPI as an overlay

Source: Author’s rendering of the virtual network of Senegal based on the dataset of CDRs provided as a part of D4D Senegal Challenge 2015

Figure 1 also shows the regional poverty index[1] as an overlay. A high poverty index corresponds to very poor regions, which are shown lighter green on the map. It is evident that regions with plenty of strong edges have lower poverty, while most poor regions appear isolated. 

Now, how can we give a more detailed look at the distribution of poverty? Using the virtual network, we extract quantitative metrics indicating the centrality of each region in Senegal. We then calculate centrality measures of all the arrondissements[2] within a region. We then correlate these regional centrality measures with the poverty index to build a regression model. Using the regression model, we predict the poverty index for each arrondissement.

Figure 2 shows the poverty map generated by our model for Senegal at an arrondissement level. It is interesting to see finer disaggregation of poverty to identify pockets of arrondissement, which are most in need of sustained growth. The poorer arrondissements are shown lighter green in color with high values for the poverty index.

Figure 2: Predicted poverty map at the arrondissement level for Senegal with MPI as an overlay

Source: Author’s rendering of the virtual network of Senegal based on the dataset of CDRs provided as a part of D4D Senegal Challenge 2015.

What is next for call data records and other Big Data in relation to eradicating poverty and improving the human development?

This investigation is only the beginning. Since poverty is a complex phenomenon, poverty maps showcasing multiple perspectives, such as ours, provide policymakers with better insights for effective responses for poverty eradication. As noted above, these maps can be used for decomposing information on deprivation of health, education, and living standards—the main indicators of human development index.

Even more particularly, we believe that this Big Data and our models can generate disaggregated poverty maps for Senegal based on gender, the urban/rural gap, or ethnic/social divisions. Such poverty maps will assist in policy planning for inclusive and sustained growth of all sections of society. Our methodology is generic and can be used to study other socio-economic indicators of the society.

Like many uses of Big Data, our model is in its nascent stages. Currently, we are working towards testing our methodology at the ground level in Senegal, so that it can be further updated based on the needs of the people and developmental interventions can be planned. The pilot project will help to "replicate" our methodology in other underdeveloped countries.

In the forthcoming post-2015 development agenda intergovernmental negotiations, the United Nations would like to ensure the “measurability, achievability of the targets” along with identification of 'technically rigorous indicators' for development. It is in this context that Big Data can be extremely helpful in tackling extreme poverty.

Note: This examination was part of the "Data for Development Senegal" Challenge, which focused on how to use Big Data for grass-root development. We took part in the Data Challenge, which was held in conjunction with NetMob 2015 at MIT from April 7-10, 2015. Our team received the National Statistics prize for our project titled, "Virtual Network and Poverty Analysis in Senegal.” This blog reflects the views of the authors only and does not reflect the views of the Africa Growth Initiative.

[1] As a measure of poverty, we have used the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), which is a composite of 10 indicators across the three areas: education (years of schooling, school enrollment), health (malnutrition, child mortality), and living conditions.

[2] Senegal is divided into 14 administrative regions, which are further divided into 123 arrondissements.

Event Information

Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin made his fourth visit to China since President Xi Jinping became top party leader in 2012. During this latest meeting, the two countries inked more than 30 deals, including an oil supply contract, and issued numerous joint statements, one of which criticized the United States for its plans to deploy missile defense systems on the Korean Peninsula and in the Balkans. Chinese state media speculate that this year’s China-Russia joint naval exercises, held annually since 2005, will likely be led by the South China Sea Fleet, reinforcing a general perception in China and elsewhere that U.S. policies are pushing Chinese leaders to consolidate ties with Russia.

On July 26, the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings hosted a discussion on the U.S.-China-Russia trilateral relationship, the shape and scope of which carries far-reaching consequences for international order and global economic growth. Brookings President Strobe Talbott, who served as deputy secretary of state and ambassador-at-large on the new independent states following the Soviet breakup, provided an introduction. A panel of experts—J. Stapleton Roy, Fiona Hill, Yun Sun, and Cheng Li—discussed the current and historical dynamics at play, including expectations and recommendations for the future.

Video

• Is the United States losing China to Russia?

Audio

• Is the United States losing China to Russia?

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20160726_china_russia_us_transcript