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  Dean's Significant Activities Report

  Katie Daily

  The Dean’s Weekly Significant Activities Report lists all activities conducted within the Departments, Centers & Staff. The Report is provided to the Dean and Directorate personnel for situational awareness.

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  A Celebration of West Point Authors

  Heather Seminelli

  Today we celebrate the more than 300 works of scholarship produced at the Academy between July and December 2018. This event is celebrating the "Semester of Grant" with Dr. Elizabeth Samet, Department of English and Philosophy, The Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant & USMA Special Collections and Archives presenting unique items from and relating to Ulysses S. Grant.

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  Educating the Military...and Others. Building the Basis for Effective Atrocity Prevention

  David Frey

  This book presents the insights, advice and suggestions of secondary level teachers and professors in relation to teaching about various facets of genocide. The contributions are extremely eclectic, ranging from the basic concerns when teaching about genocide to a discussion as to why it is critical to teach students about more general human rights violations during a course on genocide, and from a focus on specific cases of genocide to various pedagogical strategies ideal for teaching about genocide. David Frey's article focuses on the importance and methods for teaching atrocity prevention to current and future military officers.

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  Harnessing single board computers for military data analytics

  Suzanne Matthews

  Executive summary: This chapter covers the use of Single Board Computers (SBCs) to expedite onsite data analytics for a variety of military applications. Onsite data summarization and analytics is increasingly critical for command, control, and intelligence (C2I) operations, as excessive power consumption and communication latency can restrict the efficacy of down-range operations. SBCs offer power-efficient, inexpensive data-processing capabilities while maintaining a small form factor. We discuss the use of SBCs in a variety of domains, including wireless sensor networks, unmanned vehicles, and cluster computing. We conclude with a discussion of existing challenges and opportunities for future use.

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  A Celebration of West Point Authors

  Heather Seminelli

  Today we celebrate the more than 200 works of scholarship produced at the Academy between July and December 2017. The theme of this event is the intersection of civilian and military technology, policy, and innovation.

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  From Hitler's Germany to Saddam's Iraq: The Enduring False Promise of Preventive War

  Scott Silverstone

  The run up to the Iraq War in 2003 sparked renewed interest among policy makers and scholars in the strategic and ethical dimensions of preventive war; this interest was deepened by debate in the years since over whether preventive attack against Iran's or North Korea's nuclear infrastructure would be a wise strategy to neutralize these potential threats. Historically, preventive war has been a common strategy for states facing a rival that’s growing in military power, a situation that often generates the temptation to deliver a physical blow against the rival today in order to avoid a more dangerous future. This book confronts the strategic logic of preventive war head on, drawing from 2,500 years of history to warn against the false promise that attacking rising threats will solve the security problems that haunt our visions of the future. The book showcases a paradoxical outcome that has plagued preventive war strategies for millenia, in which operational military success against rising powers in the short term most often creates greater strategic dangers over the long term rather than eliminate them. At the heart of the book is the story of an iconic historical claim that Britain and France missed an opportunity to stop World War II through preventive attack against Germany during the 1936 Rhineland crisis. A sober minded assessment of the European security dilemma in the 1930s opens a window on the enduring flaws inherent to preventive war strategies that have relevance to contemporary foreign policy problems.

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  Echoes of the Shoah: the 1951 Resettlement of Budapest’s Jews

  David Frey

  A series of large-scale expropriations and evictions of the heavily Jewish Budapest middle-class in 1951 revealed the limited implementation and enforcement of the Human Rights provisions of the Hungarian constitution. The American Legation and the US State Department collected evidence of Human Rights violations, which stirred an international debate over events in Hungary that offers evidence that there was "Holocaust silence" in the early 1950s.

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  Jews, Nazis, and the Cinema of Hungary: The Tragedy of Success, 1929-44

  David Frey

  Between 1929 and 1942, Hungary’s motion picture industry experienced meteoric growth. It leapt into Europe’s top echelon, trailing only Nazi Germany and Italy in feature output. This robustness inspired Hungarian intellectuals to predict that film would help their kingdom regain its rightful place as one of Europe’s leading Kulturnationen. This became the holy grail of Hungarian cultural politics—to produce a cohesive, attractive and exportable national culture that would allow Hungary not only to recapture the prestige and power lost in the post-Great War settlements while also uniting all ethnic Hungarians. Yet by 1944, Hungary’s cinema was in shambles, its unification experiments and its productive capacity destroyed by a combination of internecine conflict and external influences it had no hope of controlling. This cultural and political history examines the birth, unexpected ascendance, and wartime collapse of Hungary’s early sound cinema by placing it within a complex international nexus. Detailing the interplay of Hungarian cultural and political elites, Jewish film professionals and financiers, Nazi officials, and global film moguls, Frey demonstrates how the transnational process of forging an industry designed to define a national culture proved particularly contentious and surprisingly contradictory in the heyday of racial nationalism and antisemitism.

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  A Celebration of West Point Authors

  Heather Seminelli

  Today, we celebrate the more than 100 works of scholarship produced at the Academy between July and December 2016. In addition, we will hear four short excerpts of publications or presentations around the topic of security.

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  A Celebration of West Point Authors

  Heather Seminelli

  Today we celebrate the more than 200 works of scholarship produced at the Academy between January and June 2017. Our featured work is “Intolerance: Political Animals and Their Prey,” a book which grew from a year-long multidisciplinary collaboration between faculty members of Bard College and West Point.

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  After Genocide: Rwanda and the African Future

  David Frey and Bonnie Kovatch

  How do we think about-and plan for-the unthinkable? Contemplating the apocalypse has traditionally been a task reserved for prophets, poets, and philosophers. Today they are joined by statesmen and bureaucrats. As the modern state comes to oversee emergency management and disaster relief, real-world policymakers increasingly find themselves forced to envision the worst that can happen. To what degree do they succeed in doing so? How can individuals in an ordered society properly anticipate disorder? What are today's worst case scenarios and to what degree is United States foreign policy prepared to respond to them? The contributors to this volume address these and related questions, in essays that cast students as policymakers on the cusp of consequential decisions. "It doesn't matter if the potential threat is a cyberattack, terrorism, a natural disaster, or even, God forbid, zombies. In our currently vulnerable state, every scenario is a worst case scenario. And this is why asking this volume's question-what is the worst that could happen?-is so important." -Max Brooks, author of World War Z, from the Foreword to this volume.

  Dr. David Frey and Bonnie Kovach examine the genocide in Rwanda and what we can learn from this example of the worst that can happen.

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  Infrastructure and the Operational Art: A Handbook for Understanding, Visualizing, and Describing Infrastructure Systems

  Steven D. Hart, James Ledlie Klosky, Scott Katalenich, Berndt Spittka, and Erik Wright

  The Army’s understanding of infrastructure as an operational variable has been evolving over the past 30 years in response to significant events ranging from international conflicts to domestic weather-related disasters. These experiences have combined to drive a significant shift in infrastructure doctrine, which now demands that commanders and staffs understand, visualize, and describe the infrastructure variable to accomplish the Army’s assigned infrastructure missions of protecting, restoring, and developing infrastructure—all missions essential to restoring stability after conflict or disaster. Current Army doctrine, however, does not say how commanders and staffs are to approach these challenging tasks. This report presents a cognitive framework for understanding, visualizing, and describing infrastructure by using five conceptual models created to allow commanders and staffs to think critically, creatively, and completely about infrastructure problems. The report also includes the scholarship behind the models including verification, validation, and certification as well as example applications of the models to actual situations. Infrastructure is a concern for both civil society and the military, and the models work equally well in both. The authors actively solicit feedback from any reader on the use, application, and improvement of these models

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  Competitor or Compatriot? Hungarian Film in the Shadow of the Swastika, 1933–44

  David Frey

  Frey's article provides a general overview of Hungarian-German film relations from 1933-1944. It begins with a discussion of the purge of non-Germans from German cinema (1932-34) and the impact of this purge on the development of the Hungarian film industry. It then progresses through a general consideration of the Kulturpolitik and Filmpolitik between Nazi Germany and Hungary through the 1930s. This segment focuses on shared notions of “national film”; the centrality of antisemitism; and the triangular relationship between Germany,Hungary, and the United States. Using previous undiscovered primary source material, the article considers German pressure onHungary to remove Jewish figures from the domestic Hungarian film industry.

  The onset of the Second World War enabled Hungary to complete its transformation from fledgling film maker to the continent’s third most prolific producer of sound feature film (trailing only Germany and Italy in 1942). Despite attempts to resolve differences and increase the number of co-productions, Germany and Hungary found themselves at loggerheads over film matters with greater and greater frequency. This article explains those areas of contest and competition, and occasional cooperation.

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  The Army Officer's Guide to Mentoring

  Raymond Kimball

  Mentoring matters! It matters because it shapes both the present and future of our Army. It matters because at our core, we are social beings who need the company of one another to blossom. It matters because, as steel sharpens steel, so professionals become more lethal and capable when they can feed off one another. This book is all about the lived experience of mentoring for Army officers. Within these pages, you will read real stories by real officers talking about their mentoring experiences.