by Dr. Jill S. Russell, @jsargentr Over the last year, members of faculty at King’s College London and West Point Military Academy have been producing blog posts on subjects of professional interest to military practitioners and academics alike. This has then generated professional discussions on social media sites under the hashtag #CCLKOW. There are… Read More Into the Future with #CCLKOW
DR DAVID P HOUGHTON One of the most troubling concepts to appear on the scene in recent years is Joseph Nye’s much-popularized notion of ‘soft power’. Without a doubt, there is something rather vague that one can conveniently label soft power, defined as ‘the power to attract’. All nations have an appeal to someone, and… Read More The Worrying Talk About ‘Soft Power’
ANNA BRINKMAN There are few moments more satisfying, or tantalizing, for an historian than looking through the catalogue of an archive and discovering that it holds vast repositories of material relevant to one’s research. . Though catalogues give an idea of the material contained in a collection, with varying degrees of accuracy, it is always… Read More From the Archives: Versions of History in Two Collections: Assessing the Purpose and Conclusions of Compilers
DR RICHARD HAMMOND The recent Military Learning and Innovation Roundtable at the JSCSC produced a fascinating set of papers and subsequent posts on this blog. In the last of these, Stuart Griffin referenced Adam Grissom’s seminal article assessing the state of military innovation studies. Grissom identified the rapidly expanding literature as falling within four broad… Read More Barriers to Innovation and Operational Learning: A Case Study of Inter-service Rivalry from the Second World War
By DR HUW J. DAVIES In the early 1740s, Henry Lloyd, a young Welshman aspiring to join the British Army, was defrauded of his inheritance by his unscrupulous step-father. This propelled Lloyd into an unconventional path to a military career. Bereft of the money required to purchase a commission in the British Army, Lloyd fled… Read More Henry Lloyd, National Character and the Study of Military History in the Eighteenth Century
DR JONATHAN FENNELL In a previous blog post, I argued that by assessing rates of sickness, battle exhaustion, desertion, absence without leave and self inflicted wounds (SIW) in an army, morale can be accurately, and in a statistically robust way, measured. This methodological innovation makes it possible to assess and graph levels of morale in… Read More The British Army and the Northwest Europe Campaign of the Second World War
DR GERAINT HUGHES In a previous post I commented on the increasing importance of militias in internal conflicts, particular with both the Syrian civil war and the conflict in Iraq against so-called Islamic State. Scholars of Iraqi history can indeed draw parallels between the Kurdish peshmerga’s relevance to the US-led Coalition war effort and the… Read More ‘COUP-PROOFING’, INSURGENCIES AND MILITIAS.
by Dr ROBERT T. FOLEY In an earlier post, I examined the official histories of the First World War on the land. Obviously, the war on land was only one aspect of the First World War, combat in the air and on the sea played significant roles in the outcome of the war. Indeed, it… Read More Digital First World War Resources: Online Official Histories — The War at Sea and in the Air
by Lt Col EDWARD T. NEVGLOSKI, USMC In the 50 years since US Marines first landed at Da Nang on the morning of 8 March 1965, the history of their involvement in the Vietnam War has been one of the most misunderstood and sometimes contentious topics in modern military history. In most cases historians assert… Read More Reconsidering US Marine Corps Involvement in the Vietnam War
DR JONATHAN FENNELL There are relatively few reliable primary or secondary sources that assess levels of morale in armies. As I discussed in a previous post, this makes it extremely difficult for historians to make connections between battle outcomes and that most nebulous of military factors – morale. Considering the great and the good, from… Read More A Statistically Robust Way to ‘Measure’ Military Morale!
Defence-In-Depth 