DR ROD THORNTON On the day that the UK’s new aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, put to sea for the first time in June, Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon compared it to what he called the ‘old and dilapidated’ Russian carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov – seen recently operating off Syria. A Russian Defence Ministry spokesman… Read More Today’s Russian Navy taking the asymmetric route – with caveats
DR AMIR M. KAMEL This post is based on a research project, the activities for which I initiated during my role as a Visiting Scholar in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, in Washington, DC. Analysts and scholars of US foreign policy have long argued that Washington, DC’s engagement with foreign states have… Read More A Two-Faced US Foreign Policy?
DR VANDA WILCOX Vanda Wilcox completed a DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2006 before moving to Rome, where she now teaches at John Cabot University. She has published on Italian military leadership, training and battlefield performance as well as the popular experience and memory of the First World War in Italy. A member… Read More Conference Report: Two Day Conference in War and Peace Studies, School of History, University of Leeds, 15-16 June
Dr Daniel Salisbury is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California. He completed his PhD at the King’s College London Department of War Studies in 2016. This blogpost draws on research which will be published in the Nonproliferation Review later in the year. As North Korea demonstrated by… Read More What Drives the Middlemen? Exploring Involvement in WMD-related Illicit Trade
DR BEN KIENZLE On 23 June 2016, the British people voted to leave the European Union (EU). This has been widely seen as one of the most important strategic decisions of the UK in a generation. In the immediate aftermath of the EU referendum, Ellen Hallams and Ben Kienzle have brought together researchers from King’s… Read More No news is good news? The field of security & defence one year after the Brexit referendum
DR DEBORAH SANDERS One of the key challenges of military reform for any military organisation is the question ‘are we preparing for the right war?’ In my article ‘”The War We Want; The War That We Get”: Ukraine’s Military Reform and the Conflict in the East’, I examine this issue in the context of Ukrainian… Read More Ukraine’s Military Reform and the Conflict in the East
PROF NIALL BARR Professor Niall Barr is author of Pendulum of War: The Three Battles of El Alamein and will be giving a keynote lecture at the 75th Anniversary Conference on El Alamein at Wolverhampton University, 5-7th September 2017. There is no doubt that the first of July 1916 holds a special place in the… Read More Remembering ‘The Crucial Days’*
KEVIN ROWLANDS Commander Kevin Rowlands is a naval officer who was awarded a PhD in 2015 through the Defence Studies Department. He is the editor of 21st Century Gorshkov, recently published by the US Naval Institute Press. In the following post he argues the origins of Russia’s current maritime strategy can be traced to the… Read More THE RETURN OF GORSHKOV AND THE NEW COLD WAR AT SEA
DR JONATHAN FENNELL & DR DAVID MORGAN-OWEN —You can access a full list of audio and video recordings of the event via soundcloud or youtube — On 5 June, the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War and the School of Security Studies King’s College London hosted a conference on War in Historical… Read More War in Historical and Contemporary Perspective Conference Report
DR EMMANUEL KARAGIANNIS and DR TRACEY GERMAN The conflict in eastern Ukraine has entered its fourth year with little sign of a negotiated resolution. Crimea has been absorbed into the Russian Federation and celebrated the third anniversary of its ‘integration’ in March 2017. To date, most scholarly analyses of the conflict have focused on the… Read More The Ukrainian Crisis: The Role of, and Implications for, Sub-State and Non-State Actors
Defence-In-Depth 