DR SIMON MOODY Thinking about future war is important. Very important. History is replete with examples of military organisations that became the unwitting authors of their own demise because they failed to adapt to the changing military environment in which they operated. The French were out-fought and out-thought in 1940 because of a stagnant military… Read More Future War: Thinking the Thinkable
DR ALISON HAWKS —The data presented here was drawn from a large-scale study of armed private security contractors, of which this blog post is one aspect. The study set out to explore the perceptions and realities of being a private security contractor after military service. Of the men and women who completed the survey (n=1516),… Read More What Private Security Contracting can Teach Us About Recruitment and Retention in the Armed Forces
DR DAVID ROBERTS On 1 November 2015, the UK Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond inaugurated the beginning of works constructing the UK’s first permanent military base in Bahrain in the Persian Gulf since 1971 when the UK withdrew from the region. Using language that almost seemed to deliberately hark back to Britain’s colonial days in the… Read More UK in the Gulf: to Engage or not to engage?
DR JEFFREY MICHAELS AND DR ANDREW GAWTHORPE In a recent article in a special issue of Small Wars & Insurgencies, we considered the contribution Hollywood has made to our understanding of counterinsurgency and nation-building during the Vietnam War. The war has been the subject of so many blockbuster films that it is inevitable that they… Read More Film Portrayals of Counterinsurgency and Nation-building in Vietnam
ROBERT SEELY Over 18 months into Russia’s not-so-very-proxy, proxy war in Ukraine, there remains a thriving and fascinating debate over the tools of conflict that Russia uses, how one describes those tools and where Russia’s next ‘target’ may be. I was asked to respond to Rod Thornton’s recent blog on Russia. In his excellent piece,… Read More RUSSIA HYBRID WAR – A RESPONSE
PROF. GREG KENNEDY The election of former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s eldest son Justin to the Prime Ministership is a sad outcome for a number of reasons. Firstly, despite the majority of Canadians believing they have a moral and ethical superiority, obtained through universal healthcare and gun-control, they have shown politically that they are… Read More OOOOHH Canada, Really?
DR CHRIS TRIPODI I recently had the privilege of accompanying the Commander Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (COMARRC) and his senior HQ staff to Sicily. The purpose of my presence, and that of my esteemed colleague Dr Niall Barr, was to act as an historical advisor on the annual COMARRC staff ride. This five day exercise… Read More Holidays in the Sun
DR CINDY MAY Nearly every major International Relations journal has recently forecasted the United States’ decline. Washington’s limited role in NATO airstrikes in Libya and President Obama’s restrained foreign policy are cited as evidence of American demise. The decline perspective (summarised here, here and here) maintains that “foreign policy failures, most notably the Iraq conflict, have… Read More American Decline and The Middle East: The Role of Isolationism
DR JONATHAN FENNELL In my last post, I explored the relationship between the performance of British Second Army in Northwest Europe, 1944 to 1945, and three variables – levels of morale, the weight of firepower used, and the operational level approach employed. The blog concluded that there was a weak correlation between these variables and… Read More Strategy and Combat Effectiveness
This is the third in a series of posts from a recent research symposium organised by Dr Ellen Hallams on ‘The Reconfiguration of American Primacy in World Politics: Domestic and International Challenges.’ In this piece, Dr David Houghton discusses the role of domestic factors in shaping current and future US foreign policy. DR DAVID HOUGHTON Domestic impediments to US… Read More Domestic Challenges to US Primacy?
Defence-In-Depth 