UNO, USSTRATCOM Combine Education With Military Excellence

For former Secretary of Defense and UNO alumnus Chuck Hagel, the world is a much different place than when he first entered public office in 1997.

With conflict in the Middle East; a growing threat in the well-financed and media-savvy ISIS; refugees fleeing dictators across the globe; and cyber-terrorism as one of the most immediate threats facing the United States, he says that there is “no part of the world that doesn’t affect every other part of the world.”

It is because of this “new world order,” in Hagel’s words, that partnerships between the military and academic institutions are more vital than ever.

The setting for this vision of the future from the former head of the Pentagon was a gathering of military and academic leaders who were on the UNO campus for the inaugural Assurance and Deterrence Conference and Workshop, which took place Thursday, March 3, and Friday, March 4.

Hagel provided the conference’s opening keynote and was joined by the commander of U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), Adm. Cecil Haney, and UNO Chancellor John Christensen in speaking to conference participants, made up of USSTRATCOM officials, researchers from universities around the country, and several dozen UNO political science students, about the importance of avoiding international conflict in order to protect national security, particular in the case of nuclear weapons.

“Deterrence isn’t easy,” Haney said. “We need to inspire and develop the next Thomas Schelling or Henry Kissinger to address 21st century deterrence, assurance and escalation control issues. This is why it is so important to me to have an academic alliance with universities across the country.”

The choice for UNO to hold this conference, one of the first of its kind, follows on the heels of being named the best four-year university for veterans for a second straight year.

The achievement places UNO as a leader among its peers in military-focused partnerships, including within the USSTRATCOM’s Academic Alliance, which was founded in 2014 as a way to stimulate new thinking and develop future generations of deterrence practitioners. Since then, 23 local and national universities, including three of the four University of Nebraska campuses, have teamed up with the command to confront the challenges in the increasingly complex security environment in which USSTRATCOM operates.

“As one of the first institutions to join the alliance, we were excited to be the host for the inaugural conference and to bring alliance members together,” explained conference co-chair Lana Obradovic, Ph.D., an assistant professor of political science at UNO. “When we began planning this event with USSTRATCOM back in November, we were expecting less than 100 participants but ended up hosting 220, so it really exceeded our wildest expectations.”