BY DR FRANK O’DONNELL India’s nuclear forces are growing in diversity and technical capability. Unprecedented new nuclear posture options are being placed in the hands of Indian defence planners. India today stands ready to field the first of an indigenous fleet of nuclear-armed submarines; ICBM-range ballistic missiles; and a new generation of short-range ballistic missiles.… Read More Three Questions for Indian Nuclear Policy
By DR SIMON MOODY Underpinning DCDC’s Global Strategic Trends – Out to 2045 is the idea that the future operating environment will be Congested, Cluttered, Contested, Connected, and Constrained (the so-called Five C’s). Implicit in this assumption is that military forces will be increasingly called upon to fight in the urban domain. Indeed, global trends… Read More Urban Operations in the Future Operating Environment
DR GERAINT HUGHES Ever since the annexation of Crimea in February-March 2014, and the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, military analysts have debated the nature of ‘hybrid war’ – or ‘non-linear’/’ambiguous warfare’ – and whether it represents the military strategy of choice for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The Polish, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian militaries in particular are using Ukrainian-style… Read More LITTLE GREEN MEN AND RED ARMIES: WHY RUSSIAN ‘HYBRID WAR’ IS NOT NEW
This is the third in a series of posts to come out of the Regional Security Research Centre (RSRC) organised Round Table titled ‘Decoding IS [DAISH] – Retrospect and Prospect’, which took place on 8 February 2016. The Round Table covered issues concerned with the evolution, regional linkages, strategy and tactics, as well as the… Read More Thinking the Unthinkable over ISIL
By ROBERT SEELY Is Russia in a new cold war with the West? Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev seems to think so. “We have slid, in essence, into times of a new Cold War,” Medvedev told an audience of diplomats on 13 February at the Munich conference, blaming NATO states for the deterioration of relations. Medvedev’s words… Read More When is a Cold War not a Cold War?
DR GERAINT HUGHES Military manuals do not often attract readers from outside of the profession of arms, and the publication of the US Army/US Marine Corps’ manual on counter-insurgency (FM3/24) by the University of Chicago Press ten years ago was one of those rare occasions where military doctrine gained an audience beyond the armed forces. FM3/24… Read More Uncertain COINage
by Dr ROBERT T. FOLEY On Monday this past week, the Defence Studies Department’s Article Writing Month challenge came to a close. All told, 18 academics from the Defence Studies Department each undertook to write an article during a busy teaching month. Each participant signed up to a Google spreadsheet that each other participant can… Read More Lessons of Article Writing Month
BY DR CHRIS TUCK Stabilisation is out of fashion: burned by our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan there seems precious little appetite for engagement any time soon in complex nation-building tasks. Instead, the new ‘concept du jour is ‘Building Stability Overseas,’ a term that encompasses stabilisation, but also a whole range of other more discrete… Read More Syria: Bombing, Peace, and Then What?
By DR STUART GRIFFIN For those of us who are getting slightly older than we care to admit, it does not seem so long ago that the UK was championing new UN peacekeeping for a new era and pledging its full support to UN efforts to halt the slide of failing states into collapse. For… Read More The UK and UN Peacekeeping: Back in Blue?
This is the third in a series of posts to come out of the Regional Security Research Centre (RSRC) organised Round Table titled ‘Decoding IS [DAISH] – Retrospect and Prospect’, which took place on 8 February 2016. The Round Table covered issues concerned with the evolution, regional linkages, strategy and tactics, as well as the future… Read More Iraq: Shi’a Militias – Partners or Contestants of Iraqi Stability
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