By DR AMIR KAMEL and DR DAVID MORGAN-OWEN As the Easter break comes into sight, we would like to take this opportunity to look back on the year to date and point to what will be coming up on Defence-in-Depth over the spring and summer. The last three months have seen a number of developments and anniversaries which… Read More Signing off for Easter
DR DAVID ROBERTS A small Arab Gulf State is not the first place in the Middle East that one might expect to fashion a foreign policy according to Thomas Jefferson’s dictum of the importance of separating church and state. Yet this is what the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is doing. Key leaders in the state… Read More The UAE’s Jeffersonian Foreign Policy
DR KEN PAYNE There are two bits of Clausewitz (just two?) that have long puzzled me. The first is where he says that a statesman should know what sort of war he’s embarking on, before getting into it. In modern times, that line has often been contrasted with John Reid’s unfortunate quote about Helmand, in which he… Read More On the psychology of defence
BY DR HUGO MEIJER NB: This is a short summary of Trading with the Enemy: the Making of US Export Control Policy toward the People’s Republic of China, Oxford University Press (February 2016, available here). In the twenty-first century, the US-China relationship is characterized by a mixture of economic interdependence and rivalry in the military realm.… Read More Power and Plenty in US-China Strategic Competition
BY DR FRANK O’DONNELL India’s nuclear forces are growing in diversity and technical capability. Unprecedented new nuclear posture options are being placed in the hands of Indian defence planners. India today stands ready to field the first of an indigenous fleet of nuclear-armed submarines; ICBM-range ballistic missiles; and a new generation of short-range ballistic missiles.… Read More Three Questions for Indian Nuclear Policy
By DR SIMON MOODY Underpinning DCDC’s Global Strategic Trends – Out to 2045 is the idea that the future operating environment will be Congested, Cluttered, Contested, Connected, and Constrained (the so-called Five C’s). Implicit in this assumption is that military forces will be increasingly called upon to fight in the urban domain. Indeed, global trends… Read More Urban Operations in the Future Operating Environment
DR GERAINT HUGHES Ever since the annexation of Crimea in February-March 2014, and the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, military analysts have debated the nature of ‘hybrid war’ – or ‘non-linear’/’ambiguous warfare’ – and whether it represents the military strategy of choice for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The Polish, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian militaries in particular are using Ukrainian-style… Read More LITTLE GREEN MEN AND RED ARMIES: WHY RUSSIAN ‘HYBRID WAR’ IS NOT NEW
This is the third in a series of posts to come out of the Regional Security Research Centre (RSRC) organised Round Table titled ‘Decoding IS [DAISH] – Retrospect and Prospect’, which took place on 8 February 2016. The Round Table covered issues concerned with the evolution, regional linkages, strategy and tactics, as well as the… Read More Thinking the Unthinkable over ISIL
By ROBERT SEELY Is Russia in a new cold war with the West? Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev seems to think so. “We have slid, in essence, into times of a new Cold War,” Medvedev told an audience of diplomats on 13 February at the Munich conference, blaming NATO states for the deterioration of relations. Medvedev’s words… Read More When is a Cold War not a Cold War?
DR GERAINT HUGHES Military manuals do not often attract readers from outside of the profession of arms, and the publication of the US Army/US Marine Corps’ manual on counter-insurgency (FM3/24) by the University of Chicago Press ten years ago was one of those rare occasions where military doctrine gained an audience beyond the armed forces. FM3/24… Read More Uncertain COINage
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