DR JONATHAN FENNELL There are relatively few reliable primary or secondary sources that assess levels of morale in armies. As I discussed in a previous post, this makes it extremely difficult for historians to make connections between battle outcomes and that most nebulous of military factors – morale. Considering the great and the good, from… Read More A Statistically Robust Way to ‘Measure’ Military Morale!
by DR KEN PAYNE The Vietnam war is quite a story. And it’s a story rich with irony: the dramatic irony of unintended consequences and flawed heroes. That makes it hard, perhaps impossible, for modern artists to say much new about conflict, and explains why that war continues to resonate a half century after the… Read More War Stories
DR ANDREW GAWTHORPE A new book from Evan Thomas reminds us – as if we needed it – of the peculiarities of President Richard Nixon. Brilliant, reclusive, and disturbed, Nixon ought to defy caricature even though he has often been the subject of it. His foreign policy partnership with Henry Kissinger reflected this. By marginalizing… Read More Nixon the Nation-Builder? Strategic Understanding in the Vietnam War
by DR GERAINT HUGHES Last month, I was invited to a workshop at the University of Glasgow on ‘Proxy Actors, Psyops, and Irregular Warfare’. This proved to be a valuable experience, giving me the opportunity to share and debate ideas with fellow academics, and also to develop a strand of research that started with an… Read More Militias, Weak States, and Contemporary Warfare
This is the third of several posts running on Defence-in-Depth over the next few weeks arising out of the Military Learning and Innovation Roundtable held at the Joint Services Command and Staff College on Wednesday 17 June 2015. The roundtable explored the various ways in which armed forces have learned, adapted, and innovated in times… Read More Beyond the Western Front: Inter-Theatre Learning in the British Army of the First World War
DR TIM BENBOW It was a signal that Admiral Bertram Ramsay must have been longing to send, while being concerned at the potential consequences: ‘CARRY OUT OPERATION HERMETIC’. The issue of this simple order would have executed the contingency plan he had devised as Allied Naval Commander, Expeditionary Force to counter any attempt by the… Read More From the Archives: Operation ‘Hermetic’: countering the threat to D-Day from the German surface fleet
VIPUL DUTTA The Great War inhabits an elusive space in India today. Not entirely forgotten nor actively remembered, it oscillates between memory and oblivion. However, the buzz surrounding the Centenary celebrations in India raised some important questions about how we remember our past and forget it at the same time. The First World War is… Read More India and the First World War
by Dr. HELEN McCARTNEY A new survey by Ipsos MORI and King’s College London has provided a fascinating insight into the way publics view their armed forces. The international survey was conducted in Great Britain, Australia, Canada, France, and the US and compared public beliefs about the armed forces with reality. The results for Britain… Read More Public Views of the Armed Forces in Britain: Misperceptions and Implications in 2015
DR TIM BENBOW The Battle of Waterloo is a military victory well worth commemorating, even celebrating. The brilliant generalship of the Duke of Wellington and the fighting skill of his coalition army (with its German, Belgian and Dutch as well as British troops) together with their Prussian allies achieved a famous victory. It deserves its… Read More The Battle of Waterloo and its strategic context
BLEDDYN BOWEN The politics of war and peace in space is an overlooked field. Space is a quiet and lonely place in war studies – despite space systems performing critical infrastructure roles in war, peace, politics, economics, and nuclear stability. In the mid-1990s John Sheldon and Colin Gray bemoaned the fact that there is no… Read More Clausewitz in Orbit: Spacepower Theory and Strategic Education
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