DR GERAINT HUGHES James Bond aficionados will no doubt remember the scene in Ian Fleming’s first novel Casino Royale (1953) in which 007 is cleaned out at the baccarat table by the trade unionist and clandestine SMERSH agent, Le Chiffre. Facing the prospect of defeat in not just a card game, but an intelligence operation… Read More The Marshall Plan: Seventy Years On
DR JONATHAN FENNELL In the first of a series of blogs 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… Read More A Social Class Survey of the New Zealand Army in the Second World War
DR CHRISTIAN TRIPODI In September 2015 I accompanied the Headquarters of the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC) to Sicily, a trip which I’ve described in a previous post. My role, in concert with my colleague Professor Niall Barr, was to act as an historical advisor to the assorted gathering of senior officers, civil servants and… Read More Strategy, Theory, and History
DR JONATHAN FENNELL Military personnel are rarely placed at the centre of analyses of social and political change in the twentieth century. The growing consensus that the wars of the twentieth century ‘laid the basis’ for important reforms, most notably the birth of the modern welfare state, has been driven almost exclusively by studies of… Read More Soldiers and Social Change
DR CHRISTIAN TRIPODI As the annual Advanced Command and Staff Course at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom progresses toward its conclusion, the students will shortly divide into three separate modules for the final term. One of those, the ‘Ends’ module, will draw the students into deeper consideration of the dynamics and processes underpinning… Read More History & Policy
DR GERAINT HUGHES Concepts of grand strategy generally stress the requirement of governments to outline clear strategic goals, and to ensure that all elements of national power are co-ordinated by ministers and senior officials (civil service and military) to achieve them. In recent history, one state achieved the apparent success of devising a ‘total’ strategy… Read More ‘TOTAL NATIONAL STRATEGY’: A CAUTIONARY TALE
DR CHRIS TUCK Why does hybrid war cast such a long shadow over Western conceptions of future threats? The ubiquity of the idea of hybrid war is interesting given the many serious problems with the concept. Hybrid war has, for example, little intellectual coherence, since different commentators define hybrid war in different ways. For Frank… Read More Hybrid War: The Perfect Enemy
Michael Neiberg is the inaugural Chair of War Studies at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and the author, most recently, of Path to War: How the First World War Created Modern America (Oxford University Press). You can hear Mike discuss the new book here and here. The views expressed herein are his alone and do not represent… Read More The Path to War: America and the First World War a Century On
Dr. Heather Williams In a recent article titled ‘The nuclear education of Donald J. Trump’, Dr. Jeffrey Michaels and I catalogued almost all of President Trump’s statements regarding nuclear issues over the past thirty years. This catalogue included sources ranging from Playboy to Presidential debates. The study’s findings were both surprising and concerning. The research… Read More Tweet by Tweet: Trump’s Nuclear Musings
Dr. Bleddyn Bowen This blog post is a short summary of a panel, on which I presented a paper, at the 2017 International Studies Association Annual (ISA) Convention in Baltimore, Maryland. The panel I was kindly invited to present on was titled ‘Missile Defenses, Space Weapons, and Advanced Conventional Weapons: Strategic Choices in Troubling Times… Read More Missile Defence and Spacepower: A Panel Proceeding at ISA 2017
Defence-In-Depth 