Dr. Michael Gunther The Sultanate of Oman occupies an important strategic position in the world as the state responsible for the southern portion of the Straits of Hormuz. For nearly fifty years, Sultan Qaboos bin Said steered Oman’s national strategy as its chief of state, senior diplomat, and commander of the armed forces. He followed… Read More Sultan Qaboos of Oman’s Policy of Strategic Neutrality
To see in the New Year, Defence-in-Depth is re-publishing its three most-viewed posts of 2019. At No. 1, Ben Wheatley’s new research on the visual record of the Battle of Prokhorovka. BEN WHEATLEY Ben Wheatley is a Honorary Research Fellow in the School of History, University of East Anglia and a former Teaching Fellow at… Read More In Pursuit of Prokhorovka
To see in the New Year, Defence-in-Depth is re-publishing its three most-viewed posts of 2019. At No. 2, a post from the MRes programme on the evolving concept of the operational level, and its utility in operational planning processes today. JONATHAN L This post is the second of two articles on the operational planning process… Read More The unfortunate operational level: Five good reasons to review our operational level structures.
To see in the New Year, Defence-in-Depth is re-publishing its three most-viewed posts of 2019. At No. 3, Jonathan Fennell’s account of the furlough mutiny in New Zealand and its impact on the war in the Mediterranean in 1944. JONATHAN FENNELL Jonathan Fennell is author of Fighting the People’s War: The British and Commonwealth Armies… Read More The Furlough Mutiny and the Struggle for Cassino in the Second World War
Dr. Jeffrey H. Michaels Dr. Michaels is Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London In the original script of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, the film concludes with a custard pie fight in the War Room. Thankfully, Kubrick had the good sense to avoid the full slapstick approach and chose to… Read More Strategic Studies Slapstick: A Review of Patrick Porter’s Looking Back: WWIII Remembered
Warren Chin James Kurth posed the question of ‘why we buy the weapons we do’ in an article in the magazine, Foreign Policy in 1973. Surprisingly, forty-seven years later, we are still trying to provide a satisfactory answer regarding why we spend so much money on technologically complex weaponry; weapons acquisition typically accounts for over… Read More Analyzing Weapons Acquisition through the Prism of Future War
David Whetham, Kennneth Payne While much public discussion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is focused on Terminator-like killing machines, the official UK position is that there will always be a person in (or at least on – monitoring and able to intervene) the loop making any life-or-death decisions. Unfortunately, this rather ignores defensive uses of AI… Read More AI: In Defence of Uncertainty
Robert McCabe, Deborah Sanders and Ian Speller The majority of navies are small. Given that this is the case, why is so little written about their strategies, roles and capabilities in the twenty first century? Academic research has tended instead to focus on blue water navies. Where small navies are considered at all, this tends… Read More Europe, Small Navies and Maritime Security, Balancing Traditional Roles and Emergent Threats in the 21st Century
David Whetham Some people argue that war is such a terrible thing, atrocities and war crimes are simply an inevitable consequence. While those people might be right on the tragedy that is war, thankfully, the assumption that atrocities committed by our own forces simply have to be accepted is not shared by either Western society… Read More Dark Traits and Military Ethics
This post is the first in an ongoing series showcasing interdisciplinary research in the Defence Studies Department. Amir Magdy Kamel The former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously talked about ‘known knowns’ and consequently ‘unknown unknowns’ in 2002. The Department of Defense press briefing came when Rumsfeld was quizzed on the lack of WMD… Read More Using International Political Economy to Learn about Unknowns in Security Studies
