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Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (emeritus) at FSI and Engineering
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William Perry is the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (emeritus) at Stanford University. He is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and the Hoover Institution, and serves as director of the Preventive Defense Project. He is an expert in U.S. foreign policy, national security and arms control. He was the co-director of CISAC from 1988 to 1993, during which time he was also a part-time professor at Stanford. He was a part-time lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at Santa Clara University from 1971 to 1977.

Perry was the 19th secretary of defense for the United States, serving from February 1994 to January 1997. He previously served as deputy secretary of defense (1993-1994) and as under secretary of defense for research and engineering (1977-1981). Dr. Perry currently serves on the Defense Policy Board (DPB). He is on the board of directors of Covant and several emerging high-tech companies. His previous business experience includes serving as a laboratory director for General Telephone and Electronics (1954-1964); founder and president of ESL Inc. (1964-1977); executive vice-president of Hambrecht & Quist Inc. (1981-1985); and founder and chairman of Technology Strategies & Alliances (1985-1993). He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

From 1946 to 1947, Perry was an enlisted man in the Army Corps of Engineers, and served in the Army of Occupation in Japan. He joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps in 1948 and was a second lieutenant in the Army Reserves from 1950 to 1955. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1997 and the Knight Commander of the British Empire in 1998. Perry has received a number of other awards including the Department of Defense Distinguished Service Medal (1980 and 1981), and Outstanding Civilian Service Medals from the Army (1962 and 1997), the Air Force (1997), the Navy (1997), the Defense Intelligence Agency (1977 and 1997), NASA (1981) and the Coast Guard (1997). He received the American Electronic Association's Medal of Achievement (1980), the Eisenhower Award (1996), the Marshall Award (1997), the Forrestal Medal (1994), and the Henry Stimson Medal (1994). The National Academy of Engineering selected him for the Arthur Bueche Medal in 1996. He has received awards from the enlisted personnel of the Army, Navy, and the Air Force. He has received decorations from the governments of Albania, Bahrain, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Poland, Slovenia, and Ukraine. He received a BS and MS from Stanford University and a PhD from Pennsylvania State University, all in mathematics.

Director of the Preventive Defense Project at CISAC
FSI Senior Fellow
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616 Jane Stanford Way
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Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies, Department of Political Science
Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
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Michael McFaul is the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in Political Science, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, all at Stanford University. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995 and served as FSI Director from 2015 to 2025. He is also an international affairs analyst for MSNOW.

McFaul served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014).

McFaul has authored ten books and edited several others, including, most recently, Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, as well as From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia, (a New York Times bestseller) Advancing Democracy Abroad: Why We Should, How We Can; and Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin.

He is a recipient of numerous awards, including an honorary PhD from Montana State University; the Order for Merits to Lithuania from President Gitanas Nausea of Lithuania; Order of Merit of Third Degree from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, and the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford University. In 2015, he was the Distinguished Mingde Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center at Peking University.

McFaul was born and raised in Montana. He received his B.A. in International Relations and Slavic Languages and his M.A. in Soviet and East European Studies from Stanford University in 1986. As a Rhodes Scholar, he completed his D. Phil. in International Relations at Oxford University in 1991. 

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This article sets out the constraints of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 (the “Act”), which generally prohibits active enforcement of civilian laws by the military, and describes the discretion of the military commander to assist civilian law enforcement in protecting America’s information infrastructure against computer-assisted attack. A primary purpose of this article is to help legal advisors to commanders and DoD civilian officials better understand the boundaries of command discretion so that commanders and officials can feel free to exercise proper command discretion to assist law enforcement according to military interests and their professional and personal ethics and ideals. Another primary purpose of the article is to appraise Congress of the Act, its prohibitions, and its application to assist in framing the policy debate about how to constrain or expand the discretion of commanders and other officials to most productively serve the American public.

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The Soviet Union placed a high priority on science and technology and built a huge assembly of research institutes, educational programs, design bureaus, and production enterprises embodying some measure of science and/or technology. This assembly concentrated overwhelmingly on military applications. Approximately three-quarters of this complex was located in Russia, but essential elements of many programs were located in other republics.

Starting in the Gorbachev regime there was a recognition that the economy was deteriorating and that it was necessary to reduce military expenditures and increase the civilian economy. A major element of this has been the attempt to direct a much greater effort toward the development of commercial products and services based upon technologies and skills developed in the military-industrial complex (MIC). This commercialization of Soviet and Russian military technology has been attempted by the Russians both independently, through conversion programs, and in cooperation with foreign partners. The conversion programs have had very limited success. The success of attempts at cooperative commercialization by U.S. companies and Russian enterprises have also been modest, but they illustrate workable models that could be utilized by other cooperative ventures. These cooperative commercialization ventures are the primary subject of this report.

This research is based primarily on the study of several cases of cooperative attempts by U.S. companies and Russian enterprises to commercialize Russian technology. Additional information has been gathered through participation in workshops and conferences including sessions or presentations on technology commercialization. There is no attempt to determine the total amount of such activity, but foreign investment of all types in Russia has been very small. These cases may not be representative of what is going on at many defense enterprises, especially those that do not have foreign partners. They do, however, show models of what can be achieved, as well as some of the problems encountered in technology commercialization.

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The Revolution in Business Affairs (RBA) is an effort to improve the overall effectiveness of the Department of Defense (DOD) by increasing the efficiency of its support operations. Waste and inefficiency within the DOD represent a major internal threat - an "enemy within" -- that, by drawing money away from needed modernization, could steadily erode our ability to meet the challenges of the post-Cold War era. The RBA seeks to change the way DOD does business.

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The Stanford-Harvard Preventive Defense Project
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This paper examines how well future U.S. national and theater missile defense systems will have to perform to meet reasonable defense objectives as a function of the level of the threat. Deploying a thin U.S. national missile defense today is premature because the threat is not readily apparent, the United States can deter most threats, and the United States has some conventional counterforce options against a developing state's nascent ICBM arsenal.

However, if, or when, intercontinental ballistic missile threats appear, a defense with 100 interceptors deployed at one or two sites around the continental United States should be able to to intercept between 10 and 20 apparent warheads, assuming NMD systems can detect and track warheads with a probabilty above 0.99 and that NMD interceptors have a single-shot probability of kill (SSPK) against warheads between 0.35-0.65. Theater-range ballistic missiles present a greater near-term threat. The current THAAD program may provide an effective upper-tier defense, but only if it can achieve detection and tracking probabilities in the range 0.96-0.98 and interceptor SSPKs in the range 0.4-0.65 for threats with between 100-200 apparent warheads. Larger threats will require even higher technical performance.

Similarly, the current NTW program will require the same detection and tracking probability, but with interceptor SSPKs in the range of 0.55-0.80 to deal with the size of the threat.

Moreover, for these defenses to be truly useful, they must be accompanied by an equally effective lower tier, e.g., using PAC-3 terminal defenses. The main challenge for upper- and lower-tier defenses is responsive threats that use countermeasures such as decoys and chemical or biological submunitions. Airborne boost-phase theater missile defenses are relatively robust with respect to these countermeasures and they pose relatively little threat to the nuclear forces of the five major nuclear powers. Hence, more emphasis should be placed on such systems in current U.S. missile defense plans.

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This report is a product of the Catastrophic Terrorism Study Group, a nine-month long collaboration of faculty from Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and the University of Virginia. The Group involves experts on national security, terrorism, intelligence, law enforcement, constitutional law, technologies of catastrophic terrorism and defenses against them, and government organization and management.

The Group is co-chaired by Ashton B. Carter and John M. Deutch, and the project director is Philip D. Zelikow. Organized by the Stanford-Harvard Preventive Defense Project, the work of the Study Group is part of the Kennedy School of Government's "Visions of Governance for the Twenty-First Century" project, directed by Dean Joseph S. Nye, Jr. and Elaine Kamarck.

While the danger of catastrophic terrorism is new and grave, there is much that the United States can do to prevent it and to mitigate its consequences if it occurs. The objective of the Catastrophic Terrorism Study Group is to suggest program and policy changes that can be taken by the U.S. government in the near term, including the reallocation of agency responsibilities, to prepare the nation better for the emerging threat of catastrophic terrorism.

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If high-performance computing (HPC) export control policy is to be effective, three basic premises must hold:

  • There exist problems of great national security importance that require high-performance computing for their solution, and these problems cannot be solved, or can only be solved in severely degraded forms, without such computing assets.
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  • There exist countries of national security concern to the United States that have both the scientific and military wherewithal to pursue these or similar applications.
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  • There are features of high-performance computers that permit effective forms of control.
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    This study applies and extends the methodology established in Building on the Basics [1]. Its objective has been to study trends in HPC technologies and their application to problems of national security importance to answer two principal questions:

    · Do the basic premises continue to be satisfied as the 20th century draws to a close?

    · In what range of performance levels might an export-licensing threshold be set so that the basic premises are satisfied?

    The study concludes that export controls on HPC hardware are still viable, although much weaker than in the past. In particular, while applications of national security interest abound, it is increasingly difficult to identify applications that strongly satisfy all three basic premises, i.e. are of extreme national security importance and would likely be effectively pursued by countries of national security concern and would be severely retarded without levels of computing performance that could be effectively controlled.

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    The contributors to this volume address questions central to the development and survival of democratic rule. Brought together under the auspices of a Nobel Symposium on democracy, leading experts in the field examine historical experiences, social and cultural problems, economic development, constitutional issues, the impact of globalization, and the prospects for promoting democratic government. The coverage of the book is global, and the approach is multidisciplinary, providing a unique perspective from leading historians, political scientists, economists, and sociologists. The chapters thus provide an excellent survey of different facets of, and approaches to, democracy, including such fundamental issues as the nature of democratic citizenship, and its prevalence around the world; the relationship between economic development and the progress of democracy; and the influence of international interdependence on sovereignty and democratic accountability.

    • Collection of essays covering the fundamental questions regarding the prospects for democracy
    • Global coverage, and multidisciplinary approach - political scientists, historians, economists, sociologists
    • Contributors include some of the biggest names in the field: Elster, Linz, Przeworski, Lijphart, Bhagwati, Schmitter
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    Cambridge University Press in "Democracy's Victory and Crisis: Nobel Symposium 1994", Axel Hadenius, ed.
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