DR DEANE-PETER BAKER Deane Baker is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at UNSW Canberra, and a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Military Ethics at Kings College London. He is a panelist on the International Panel on the Regulation of Autonomous Weapons (IPRAW), however his comments here… Read More Autonomous Weapons and the Epistemology of Targeting
My reading this summer included Edward Burke’s recent book on the British Army in Northern Ireland, An Army of Tribes, which has already been discussed by the author in a Defence in Depth post. Burke provides a detailed examination of two battalions committed to Operation Banner (the 1st Battalion the Scots Guards, and the 1st… Read More DSD Summer Reading #8
CHIARA LIBISELLER A few new concepts have come to dominate the more recent Western discourses on security and defence, both in the academic and practitioners’ sectors; these concepts include ‘hybrid war’, ‘cyber war’, ‘narratives’ and ‘resilience’.[i] They are invoked to help us understand, explain and react to threats that Europe and the United States are… Read More Conference Report: 2018 Vienna Conference on Strategy
DR GERAINT HUGHES On the night of the 20th-21st August 1968, Soviet paratroopers and spetsnaz soldiers seized Ruzyne airport outside Prague, proceeding subsequently to take over key points in the Czechoslovak capital. The following day, 22 Soviet Army divisions – augmented by contingents from four other ‘fraternal’ Warsaw Pact states (Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic,… Read More The End of the Prague Spring – Fifty Years On
DR BEN KIENZLE Finally: it’s summer. The time of skimming books and speed reading has come to an end (albeit only for a short time). Summer also offers the opportunity to look beyond the narrow confines of one’s own research niche. It’s time to ‘think big’! As part of the annual course at RCDS, members… Read More DSD Summer Reading #7
DR CHRIS TRIPODI Oddly, and in contrast to my colleagues, there’ll be relatively little reading happening for me this summer. Largely because the summer recess that I do get (i.e. August) will be spent writing. Consequently, most of my summer reading has already been done. And very illuminating it has been, I must say. Research… Read More DSD Summer Reading #6
Dr Bence Nemeth, DR Nicholas Dew, Dr Mie Augier Armed forces have always been attempting to foresee threats and security challenges to figure out what kind of tasks they will likely encounter in the future. Thus, anticipating the future and having an idea about what might come helps to provide assumptions and starting points for… Read More The Impact of the Organisational Mind-set on the Perception of the Future in the Armed Forces
WHITNEY GRESPIN This fall I’ll be adjunct instructing a course on “Defense Contracting in Practice” at George Washington University’s Elliott School. Inspired by my participation last year in Bridging the Gap’s International Policy Summer Institute, I pitched a course that directly ties my scholarship in to practitioner and policy interests. In preparation for this, I… Read More Summer Reading #4
DR JEFFREY MICHAELS As this academic year comes to a close, so too have I reached my limit for non-fiction. And having read too many essays consisting of sentence fragments, I thought I’d begin my holiday by reading an author known for the longest sentences in literature. Thus I look forward to Marcel Proust’s In Search… Read More DSD Summer Reading #3
RICHARD NED LEBOW is Professor of International Political Theory in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London (part-time) and James O. Freedman Presidential Professor Emeritus at Dartmouth College. He is also a Bye-Fellow of Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. He has taught strategy at the National and Naval War Colleges and served as a… Read More Avoiding War, Making Peace
Defence-In-Depth 