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
PROF JOSHUA R. SHIFRINSON Josh Shifrinson is an Assistant Professor of International Relations with the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His book, Rising Titans, Falling Giants: How Great Powers Exploit Power Shifts was published with Cornell University Press in 2018 (a copy can be ordered here or here). Additional research has appeared in International Security, the Journal of Strategic… Read More Rising States, Declining States, and the Future of U.S.-Chinese Relations
PROF PATRICK PORTER Patrick Porter is Professor of International Security and Strategy at the University of Birmingham. He is also Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, London. He researches the interaction of power and ideas in the making of foreign and defence policy in the U.S. and U.K, and in shaping their… Read More Iraq and the Limits of Power
DR ANDREW TAYLOR November 11this a significant day in the calendars of the British and Commonwealth states. It is principally Remembrance Day, commemorating the end of the First World War and reflecting upon the great cost in human life. It is also a significant date for scholars of maritime strategy. November 11th1992 was the date… Read More Gretton: Reflecting on his Enduring Lesson about Sea Control
DR CHRIS TUCK The concepts of ‘victory’ and ‘defeat’ are fundamental to effective strategy; winning, after all, is surely one of the key objectives of having a strategy for an armed conflict. In addition, reaching some accurate consensus on whether we are winning or losing provides one of the crucial steps for understanding if our… Read More Gender, Victory, and Defeat
CHIARA LIBISELLER A few new concepts have come to dominate the more recent Western discourses on security and defence, both in the academic and practitioners’ sectors; these concepts include ‘hybrid war’, ‘cyber war’, ‘narratives’ and ‘resilience’.[i] They are invoked to help us understand, explain and react to threats that Europe and the United States are… Read More Conference Report: 2018 Vienna Conference on Strategy
DR RICHARD DUNLEY Richard Dunley is a Lecturer in History at UNSW, Canberra and has recently published Britain and the Mine, 1900-1915: Strategy, Culture and International Law with Palgrave Macmillan. Why do military organisations develop and adopt some technologies with ease, whilst others face deep institutional opposition? This is a hugely important question in an… Read More Infernal Machines: the Royal Navy and the asymmetric challenge of mine warfare
DR BEN WHEATLEY Ben Wheatley is a Honorary Research Fellow in the School of History, University of East Anglia and a former Teaching Fellow at the Defence Studies Department, King’s College London. His 2017 book, British Intelligence and Hitler’s Empire in the Soviet Union, 1941-1945 published by Bloomsbury Academic will be available in paperback from August 2018. You… Read More An Open Secret: British Open Source Intelligence during the Second World War
Defence-In-Depth 