DR ROD THORNTON On the day that the UK’s new aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, put to sea for the first time in June, Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon compared it to what he called the ‘old and dilapidated’ Russian carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov – seen recently operating off Syria. A Russian Defence Ministry spokesman… Read More Today’s Russian Navy taking the asymmetric route – with caveats
DR AMIR M. KAMEL This post is based on a research project, the activities for which I initiated during my role as a Visiting Scholar in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, in Washington, DC. Analysts and scholars of US foreign policy have long argued that Washington, DC’s engagement with foreign states have… Read More A Two-Faced US Foreign Policy?
DR VANDA WILCOX Vanda Wilcox completed a DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2006 before moving to Rome, where she now teaches at John Cabot University. She has published on Italian military leadership, training and battlefield performance as well as the popular experience and memory of the First World War in Italy. A member… Read More Conference Report: Two Day Conference in War and Peace Studies, School of History, University of Leeds, 15-16 June
PROF NIALL BARR Professor Niall Barr is author of Pendulum of War: The Three Battles of El Alamein and will be giving a keynote lecture at the 75th Anniversary Conference on El Alamein at Wolverhampton University, 5-7th September 2017. There is no doubt that the first of July 1916 holds a special place in the… Read More Remembering ‘The Crucial Days’*
KEVIN ROWLANDS Commander Kevin Rowlands is a naval officer who was awarded a PhD in 2015 through the Defence Studies Department. He is the editor of 21st Century Gorshkov, recently published by the US Naval Institute Press. In the following post he argues the origins of Russia’s current maritime strategy can be traced to the… Read More THE RETURN OF GORSHKOV AND THE NEW COLD WAR AT SEA
DR BLEDDYN BOWEN The US Department of Defense and the House of Representatives have been abuzz of late regarding the question of setting up an independent space corps within the US Air Force (USAF). The House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee unveiled their intention to legislate this space corps loosely along the lines of the… Read More Space Warfare in the Pentagon: In Support of an Independent Space Corps
LT COL JAMES CHANDLER In 2015 Lieutenant Colonel James Chandler was the Chief of the General Staff’s inaugural Army Visiting Fellow to the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House. The following post is a short summary of his research paper published by Chatham House in April 2016 (available here). The author argues that if… Read More The UK’s International Defence Engagement Strategy: Lessons from Bassingbourn
HANNA SMYTH Hanna Smyth is a DPhil student at the University of Oxford with the Globalising and Localising the Great War research network. Her research examines how Imperial War Graves Commission sites represented, reinforced, and performed different aspects of identity for South Africa, India, Canada, & Australia in France and Belgium between 1917-1938. She earned her MA in… Read More The New National Army Museum: A Review
DR JONATHAN FENNELL In the first of a series posts on my new article, ‘Soldiers and Social Change: The Forces Vote in the Second World War and New Zealand’s Great Experiment in Social Citizenship’, in The English Historical Review, I outlined how the soldiers’ vote won Labour the 1943 New Zealand general election. In a… Read More Combat Cohesion to Social Cohesion
DR PAUL D. MILLER Paul D. Miller is the associate director of the Clements Center for National Security at The University of Texas at Austin. He served on the NSC staff as Director for Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2007 to 2009. North Korea is a perennial candidate for America’s next war and a regular contender… Read More Trump v. Kim: A Test of Wills Over the Korean Peninsula
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