DR DAVID P HOUGHTON One of the most troubling concepts to appear on the scene in recent years is Joseph Nye’s much-popularized notion of ‘soft power’. Without a doubt, there is something rather vague that one can conveniently label soft power, defined as ‘the power to attract’. All nations have an appeal to someone, and… Read More The Worrying Talk About ‘Soft Power’
ANNA BRINKMAN There are few moments more satisfying, or tantalizing, for an historian than looking through the catalogue of an archive and discovering that it holds vast repositories of material relevant to one’s research. . Though catalogues give an idea of the material contained in a collection, with varying degrees of accuracy, it is always… Read More From the Archives: Versions of History in Two Collections: Assessing the Purpose and Conclusions of Compilers
DR RICHARD HAMMOND The recent Military Learning and Innovation Roundtable at the JSCSC produced a fascinating set of papers and subsequent posts on this blog. In the last of these, Stuart Griffin referenced Adam Grissom’s seminal article assessing the state of military innovation studies. Grissom identified the rapidly expanding literature as falling within four broad… Read More Barriers to Innovation and Operational Learning: A Case Study of Inter-service Rivalry from the Second World War
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