Connections

The Early Years
The Partnership for Peace Consortium of Defense Academies and Security Studies Institutes, based at the George C. Marshall Center in Garmisch, Germany, is leading an innovative and unprecedented program for defense education reform in five Partner countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Moldova). The modus operandi for these efforts includes finding fertile ground for defense reform in other countries beyond the Partnership for Peace nations. Defense education in general is gaining attention as a useful tool for security policy makers. Why and how this is happening is an intriguing story that begs to be told. This article attempts to tell that story.

It begins, as do so many post-Cold War accounts, with the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR in 1991 and the steadily growing interest from Central and Eastern European countries in NATO membership. At the same time, the newly independent sovereign states of the USSR, the former Soviet Socialist Republics, began to choose their own paths. Some of them installed democratic systems of government and links to the West, while others retained authoritarian rulers.