By DR HUW J. DAVIES The annual meeting of any large professional body or learned society usually produces a wide-range of panels and papers, to which it is impossible to attend all, and between which there is usually a limited relationship. They are an opportunity for old and new colleagues from across the… Read More Conference Report: Society of Military History Annual Meeting, Ottawa, April 2016
DR DAVID MORGAN-OWEN At shortly after 4am on the morning of April 25th 1916 the residents of Lowestoft were awakened by the thunder of naval gunfire. Heavy caliber shells began to crash into the town in a whirlwind bombardment which lasted around ten minutes. Half an hour later, for the second time in the War, the… Read More Strategy, Operations and Perception: The Coastal Bombardments of 1916
ANNA BRINKMAN International agreements are often touted as great achievements of a nation’s foreign policy and are usually accompanied by great fanfare. Peace treaties, meant to offer some form of conflict resolution, and treaties which govern the conduct of neutral nations during times of war are no exception. Once the fanfare has subsided, however, there… Read More “The Room Where it Happens” Enforcing Neutrality in the West Indies during the American War of Independence
By DR AMIR M KAMEL At the 2016 International Studies Association (ISA) conference, I presented a paper arguing that the EU’s peace-through-trade policy failed in the cases of Iraq, Iran and Libya as it did not take into account the context in which it was being implemented, i.e. the barriers to peace. The paper draws from… Read More WHY THE EU’S FOREIGN POLICY FAILS TO BREAK DOWN BARRIERS TO PEACE
HANNA SMYTH Are memorials set in stone? It seems an obvious question. Yes, of course they are, and the Delville Wood and Vimy memorials are two stunningly evocative examples, set in stone as perennial testaments to those who died, those who missed them, and the emerging nations who lost them. Yet in the complex new… Read More Identities Set in Stone? The Delville Wood and Vimy Memorials As Sites of Hybridity
DURAID JALILI At the end of last year, the King’s Centre for Military Education Outreach (CMEO) put together its first ever Professional Military Education (PME) Working Group. This took place over the course of two days on the 10 – 11th December 2015, at the Joint Services Command and Staff College (Shrivenham, UK). The event… Read More Future Strategic Priorities for Professional Military Education: A Practitioner Perspective
DR ED HAMPSHIRE My previous two blogposts on the procurement trinity covered capability and cost. Many people see the problems of defence procurement as a trade-off between one of these two factors or the other, but there is also the third forgotten element: time. Delays in projects can affect the other two elements of the… Read More Understanding a different ‘holy trinity’: procurement and British defence policy, part 3: Time
DR ED HAMPSHIRE In my previous post I discussed the problems faced in defence procurement deriving from one of the members of the procurement trinity: ‘capability’. This post will now turn to the second element of this trinity: cost. It is the cost escalation of projects that unsurprisingly most exercises the Treasury when it reviews… Read More Understanding a different ‘holy trinity’: procurement and British defence policy, part 2: Cost
DR ED HAMPSHIRE In defence procurement, as in Clausewitz’s description of warfare, there is a ‘holy trinity’ that must be kept in balance to ensure success and the achievement of objectives. The procurement trinity consists of capability, cost and time. The piece of equipment, weapon system or platform that has been procured must be able… Read More Understanding a different ‘holy trinity’: procurement and British defence policy, part 1: capability
DR TRACEY GERMAN Violence has erupted in the South Caucasus, with clashes between Armenian and Azerbaijani troops along the Line of Contact around Nagorno-Karabakh resulting in a number of casualties. The military clashes began in the early hours of 2 April, while both the Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents were attending the Nuclear Security Summit in… Read More Nagorno-Karabakh clashes threaten stability in the South Caucasus
