This post is part of a special feature on military learning co-hosted with the Wavell Room, a blog & forum for discussions about contemporary British military thought. ANDY NETHERWOOD Sqn Ldr Andy Netherwood joined the RAF as a pilot in 1993 and completed tours flying the C130 and C17 as well as staff tours in… Read More Fools and Cowards
ROD THORNTON In sharp contrast to the emphasis apparent within the defence establishments of some of its closest allies and partners, the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) seems to be ignoring the value of professional military education (PME). There is no mention at all of the role of PME in the two most recent… Read More Professional Military Education in the United Kingdom: An Asset Ignored
THE EDITORS Military learning is a hot topic. It comes in many different guises: ‘conceptual development’, ‘the intellectual edge’, ‘strategic adaptability’, or ‘innovative by design.’ Yet behind the buzzwords and the dogma, what do we really mean when talk about learning in a military context? And how can we do it more effectively, without sacrificing… Read More Military Learning in the 21st Century
DR JOHN MITCHAM John is Assistant Professor of History at Duquesne University. He is an historian of the British Empire, with a particular focus on settler colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His book, Race and Imperial Defence in the British World 1870-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), examined the cultural links between Britain and… Read More Jan Smuts and the Anglo-American World Order
DR DAVID BLAGDEN David is Lecturer in International Security and Strategy at the University of Exeter’s Strategy and Security Institute. This post is intended to summarise and promote themes from his just-published book (co-edited with Mark de Rond), Games: Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation (Cambridge University Press, 2019). You can follow him on Twitter here. Why plug a… Read More Games, Strategy, and the Conflict-Cooperation Spectrum
KEVIN ROWLANDS Captain Kevin Rowlands is a naval officer who was awarded a PhD in 2015 through the Defence Studies Department of King’s College London. He is the author of Naval Diplomacy in the 21stCentury, recently published by Routledge, and the editor of 21stCentury Gorshkov, published in 2017 by the US Naval Institute Press. In… Read More SEND A GUNBOAT
DR CLARE MAKEPEACE Clare is an historian, writer, lecturer and consultant in the cultural history of the First and Second World Wars. Her debut book Captives of War. British Prisoners of War in Europe in the Second World War was published in 2017, and she holds the position of Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. You can… Read More Civil Resettlement Units – a lesson from the past
DR KEN PAYNE Know yourself, know your enemy, and in 100 battles you’ll never be defeated. It’s the only bit of Sun Tzu everyone remembers, and that’s good news for me, because the Master and I are of one mind. We’re both thinking about emotional intelligence (EI) and its role in war. A note for… Read More EI, meet IR: the emotionally attuned strategist
DR CHRISTOPHER SIMS Christopher Sims is a Non-Resident Fellow with the Modern War Institute at West Point. The muscular force posture articulated in the United States 2017National Security Strategy emphasizes a return to symmetrical military confrontation. Some important historical clues as to the future trajectory and priorities involved in facing a return to great power rivalry can be found… Read More The Misdirection of Military Keynesianism
DR SIMON MOODY The British Army was remarkably quick in getting to grips with the conceptual challenges posed by the arrival of nuclear weapons, with a rich body of theoretical literature emerging in service journals during the 1950s. The basic tactical problem identified was that mass would suffer most on a nuclear battlefield – nuclear… Read More Prophets of Nuclear Land Combat
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