Council Of Foreign Affairs Fellow To Discuss U.S. Strategy In Iraq

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WILLIAMSTOWN - Stephen D. Biddle, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and award-winning author of "Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle" will give a talk titled "U.S. Strategy in Iraq: Past Present and Future" at Williams College. His talk is scheduled for Monday, Oct. 6, at 7:30 pm in Griffin Hall, room 3. The talk is free and open to the public.

Biddle held the Elihu Root Chair of Military Studies at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute (SSI). Before joining the SSI in 2001, he was a member of the political science faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He has held research positions at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Alexandria, Virginia, Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and the Kennedy School of Government's Office of National Security Programs.

Biddle served as U.S. Representative to the NATO Defense Research Group Study on Stable Defense, is presently a member of the Defense Department Senior Advisory Group on Homeland Defense, and is co-director of the Columbia University Summer Workshop on the Analysis of Military Operations and Strategy.

He has presented testimony before congressional committees on issues relating to Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, conventional net assessment, and European arms control.

At the U.S. Army War College, his research was awarded the Barchi, Rist, and Impact Prizes from the Military Operations Research Society, and he won the Army Superior Civilian Service Medal in 2003.

His published scholarly articles include "The 2006 Lebanon Campaign and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy" (2008), "American Grand Strategy After 9/11: An Assessment" and "Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy" (2002).

His work has been awarded the Arthur Ross Book Award Silver Medal, Council on Foreign Relations (2005); Huntington Prize, Harvard University (2005); Koopman Prize, Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (2005) and the Madigan Award, Army War College Foundation (2005).

He received his Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard University.

The evening's event is sponsored by the Stanley Kaplan Program in American Foreign Policy.
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Williamstown Planning Board Narrowing in on Subdivision Bylaw Changes

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Planning Board late last month discussed specific features of what it plans to pass as a new subdivision control bylaw this year.
 
The board long has discussed the complex set of regulations as being out of date and cumbersome to both potential developers and the board itself, which has needed to hear requests for waivers of outdated rules for the handful of residential subdivisions that have been proposed in town in recent years.
 
This spring, the town engaged consultants from Northampton's Dodson and Flinker Landscape Architecture and Planning to go through the existing bylaw, compare it to more contemporary regulations in other communities and help craft a revised bylaw.
 
Unlike the zoning bylaw, where amendments require approval of town meeting, the subdivision control bylaw is a creation of the Planning Board, which can make changes on its own after a public hearing process it hopes to complete this year.
 
At a special Planning Board meeting on May 26, Dillon Sussman of Dodson and Flinker and his colleagues walked the board through a dozen different decision points that the board must resolve — either by leaving the bylaw as is or making a change — and offered suggestions based on best practices.
 
All of the issues are technical and ranged from the fundamental, like how the bylaw will define types of subdivisions, to the highly specific, like what turning radii will be required in new streets that are constructed to serve planned developments.
 
One example of a topic that came up in the recent approval of a four-home subdivision off Summer Street is stormwater management.
 
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