By DR AMIR M KAMEL On Wednesday 2 December, the British Parliament voted 397 to 223 in favour of extending the air bombing campaign, targeting DAISH (aka Islamic State, IS, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIL) from Iraq to include Syrian territory, following a one-day… Read More The UK Decision on Syria: Will air-strikes solve the problem?
DR DAVID HOUGHTON International Relations (IR) theory is certainly very useful for some things, and in a previous post I pointed out just how important it is. But by now you may have noticed some of its limitations as well. Because most of the ‘big’ theories operate at the systemic or structural level, they don’t… Read More The Indispensable Character of Foreign Policy Theory
DR DAVID WHETHAM The military profession, as with all professions, is defined and governed in large part by its ethic; the rules and behaviours by which its members conduct themselves. Any professional military force, anywhere in the world, sees itself as distinct from a ‘mere’ group of mercenaries or long-term contractors, and that self-identity is… Read More Why Does Ethics Matter for the Military?
PROFESSOR WYN BOWEN The National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) 2015 has brought deterrence back to centre stage for the United Kingdom more than at any other time since the end of the Cold War. The primary context for this in SDSR 2015 is the resurgence of state based threats. This… Read More SDSR and the Return of Deterrence
DR KENNETH PAYNE In a new paper, Kareem Ayoub and I explore how Artificial intelligence will shape strategy. Here, I focus on one important aspect of that: the ability of leaders to control the use of force. Technology is sometimes seen as a threat to the British military’s philosophy of mission command. When it works… Read More Artificial Intelligence versus mission command
DR TIM BENBOW The Strategic Defence and Security Review presented a mixed picture for maritime capabilities. On balance, those at the top of the Royal Navy are likely to be raising a glass to toast the result… but the glass is perhaps only half full. Moreover (and I am trying to keep my cliché count… Read More NSS/SDSR 2015: The Maritime Issues
DR EDWARD HAMPSHIRE This seems, at first glance, to be a highly unusual defence review: there have been announcements of additional spending – on special-forces and on drones, of the re-creation of lost capabilities with the purchase of maritime patrol aircraft, and of the establishment of two new rapid response brigades, two new Typhoon squadrons,… Read More NSS/SDSR 2015: The 2015 SDSR in context: a very unusual defence review?
DR CHRIS TUCK Strategy is, by its nature, difficult. Those things that characterise strategy – the fact, for example, that it is framed in relation to a thinking, adaptive adversary – make it relentlessly difficult to do well. This blog focuses on identifying four specific challenges that can arise in the framing of strategy. I… Read More Strategy Traps
DR CHRISTINA GOULTER As Dr Huw Davies suggested in this post, how successfully the British armed forces incorporate their recent experience of counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq into doctrine and planning is likely to shape future perceptions of those campaigns. The fight against the Taliban has not ended, even for the West, because some advisory work by… Read More COUNTER-INSURGENCY: A QUESTION OF VICTORY
DR RICHARD HAMMOND As with many of the historically themed posts on this blog, this one relates to an anniversary. November 2015 marks 75 years since the Fleet Air Arm’s famous raid on the Italian Navy at Taranto. For the loss of just two aircraft, a small force of British biplanes heavily damaged three battleships,… Read More Taranto Revisited: 75 Years On
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