by DR ROBERT T. FOLEY and DR HUW J. DAVIES

As our teaching terms comes to a close on 19 December, Defence-in-Depth will be taking a hiatus over the holidays. We will resume posting on 5 January when our new term starts.

We wanted to use this final post as an opportunity to look back on our first few months of publishing. Since beginning in early September, we have published 37 posts, which have fallen under 57 different subject tags, including ‘strategy,’ ‘diplomacy,’ ‘British defence policy,’ ‘ISIS,’ ‘First World War,’ and ‘Second World War.’ These topics reflect the range of topics currently being researched by the staff and postgraduate research students of the Defence Studies Department, 23 of whom have written for Defence-in-Depth this term.

We have been pleased that Defence-in-Depth has been reaching a relatively wide and certainly disparate readership. We have over 1,000 followers now and have had visits from 91 different countries. Posts that have garnered considerable attention on the day of their release include Dr Chris Tuck’s ‘Land Power and the Islamic State Crisis,’ Dr Ellen Hallam’s ‘NATO at Newport: Back to Basics,’ and Dr Huw J. Davies and Dr Robert T. Foley’s ‘The Operational Level of War and the Operational Art.’

We are looking forward to continuing to grow next year. In 2015, you can expect posts on the NATO, Russian-Georgian relations, a recent battlefield tour of Oman, a From the Archives post on digital First World War archives, and many others.

We would like to say thank you to our contributors, but also to our readers. We hope you have enjoyed and found useful the posts we have published this term. As ever, we are happy for feedback to improve the blog, so if you have any comments, please let us know. For those of you who have not yet subscribed via email or followed the blog, buttons for each can be found in the sidebar and at the bottom of the page. Research from the Defence Studies Department can also be followed via our Twitter account – @DefenceResearch and via our Facebook page.

We wish you all happy, healthy, and safe holidays.