DR JONATHAN FENNELL In the first of a series posts on my new article, ‘Soldiers and Social Change: The Forces Vote in the Second World War and New Zealand’s Great Experiment in Social Citizenship’, in The English Historical Review, I outlined how the soldiers’ vote won Labour the 1943 New Zealand general election. In a… Read More Combat Cohesion to Social Cohesion
DR CHRIS TUCK In previous blogs, I have talked about some of the problems inherent in strategy-making and also the internal process by which states unwittingly can create for themselves the perfect enemy. Both of these themes come together in a recent article that I have written on British operations in Borneo, 1963-66. Strategy can… Read More ‘Imagined Strategy’
DR PAUL D. MILLER Paul D. Miller is the associate director of the Clements Center for National Security at The University of Texas at Austin. He served on the NSC staff as Director for Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2007 to 2009. North Korea is a perennial candidate for America’s next war and a regular contender… Read More Trump v. Kim: A Test of Wills Over the Korean Peninsula
DR GERAINT HUGHES James Bond aficionados will no doubt remember the scene in Ian Fleming’s first novel Casino Royale (1953) in which 007 is cleaned out at the baccarat table by the trade unionist and clandestine SMERSH agent, Le Chiffre. Facing the prospect of defeat in not just a card game, but an intelligence operation… Read More The Marshall Plan: Seventy Years On
DR JONATHAN FENNELL In the first of a series of blogs on my new article, ‘Soldiers and Social Change: The Forces Vote in the Second World War and New Zealand’s Great Experiment in Social Citizenship’, in The English Historical Review, I outlined how the soldiers’ vote won Labour the 1943 New Zealand general election. In… Read More A Social Class Survey of the New Zealand Army in the Second World War
An earlier version of the article was published by Aspenia Online. DR ANISEH BASSIRI TABRIZI On May 19, about 45 million Iranians participated in the twelfth presidential election, in which incumbent President Hassan Rouhani gained a determined majority of votes. The election was widely perceived as a referendum on the achievements of the Rouhani’s administration,… Read More The Iran nuclear deal under Rouhani 2.0
Dr Robert J. Downes and Dr Christopher Hobbs In a nuclear world, there exists the possibility that nuclear weapons and their constituent materials could drift out of the control of states and into the hands of terrorists. This statement is uncontroversial and has a distinguished lineage. In 1946, during closed congressional testimony, Robert Oppenheimer opined… Read More Nuclear terrorism: There is no spoon
The material in this post is drawn from the author’s forthcoming book – The Fear of Invasion: Strategy, Politics, and British War Planning, 1880-1914 – which is published by Oxford University Press in July 2017. This post originally appeared in The European Financial Review. DR DAVID MORGAN-OWEN Strategy, it seems, matters. No forward thinking business, organisation, or government… Read More Strategy: Creating Power or Justifying Reality?
DR CHRISTIAN TRIPODI In September 2015 I accompanied the Headquarters of the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC) to Sicily, a trip which I’ve described in a previous post. My role, in concert with my colleague Professor Niall Barr, was to act as an historical advisor to the assorted gathering of senior officers, civil servants and… Read More Strategy, Theory, and History
DR JEFFREY MICHAELS In the anti-war film Go Tell the Spartans, set in Vietnam in 1964, the conflict is described as ‘going nowhere, just around and around in circles’. Perhaps a slightly more accurate representation can be found in the work of Franz Kafka, such as Der Prozeß, in which his protagonist seems to make… Read More Stuck in Endless Preliminaries: Vietnam and the Battle of the Paris Peace Table, November 1968-January 1969
Defence-In-Depth 