by DR KEN PAYNE The Vietnam war is quite a story. And it’s a story rich with irony: the dramatic irony of unintended consequences and flawed heroes. That makes it hard, perhaps impossible, for modern artists to say much new about conflict, and explains why that war continues to resonate a half century after the… Read More War Stories
This is the fifth of several posts running on Defence-in-Depth arising out of the Military Learning and Innovation Roundtable held at the Joint Services Command and Staff College on Wednesday 17 June 2015. The roundtable explored the various ways in which armed forces have learned, adapted, and innovated in times of war and peace, austerity, and pressure… Read More Military Innovation Studies: Well-Set for the Future?
DR ANDREW GAWTHORPE A new book from Evan Thomas reminds us – as if we needed it – of the peculiarities of President Richard Nixon. Brilliant, reclusive, and disturbed, Nixon ought to defy caricature even though he has often been the subject of it. His foreign policy partnership with Henry Kissinger reflected this. By marginalizing… Read More Nixon the Nation-Builder? Strategic Understanding in the Vietnam War
This is the fourth of several posts running on Defence-in-Depth over the next few weeks arising out of the Military Learning and Innovation Roundtable held at the Joint Services Command and Staff College on Wednesday 17 June 2015. The roundtable explored the various ways in which armed forces have learned, adapted, and innovated in times of… Read More Ball Bearings Innovation: The Industrial College of the Armed Forces and the Increments of Transformational Change
By DR AMIR M KAMEL The notion that trade leads to peace has been around sinceat least the first century. In the year 100 AD, Plutarch the Greek Philosopher, on the subject of sea trade, noted how the exchange of goods could bring about cooperation and friendship. Since then, the logistics and testing of the… Read More Trade Leads To Peace: Liberals and Realists Agree!
by Ewan Lawson The campaigns in the Western Desert in the Second World War are well known with locations like Sollum and Bir El Hakim having secured their place in history. What is less well known is that this area had previously been fought over some 25 years before during the Great War. Part of… Read More Defeating the Senussi (December 1915-March 1916): The appliance of science?
by DR GERAINT HUGHES Last month, I was invited to a workshop at the University of Glasgow on ‘Proxy Actors, Psyops, and Irregular Warfare’. This proved to be a valuable experience, giving me the opportunity to share and debate ideas with fellow academics, and also to develop a strand of research that started with an… Read More Militias, Weak States, and Contemporary Warfare
This is the third of several posts running on Defence-in-Depth over the next few weeks arising out of the Military Learning and Innovation Roundtable held at the Joint Services Command and Staff College on Wednesday 17 June 2015. The roundtable explored the various ways in which armed forces have learned, adapted, and innovated in times… Read More Beyond the Western Front: Inter-Theatre Learning in the British Army of the First World War
by DR DAVID MORGAN-OWEN Historians seeking the origins of what would become a full-scale ‘continental commitment’ in 1916 have dissected pre-war British strategic planning in search of the decisions which led to the deployment of the BEF to France. Perhaps the most often cited precursor to the ultimate decision to send British troops to the… Read More British Grand Strategy in 1914
This is the second of several posts running on Defence-in-Depth over the next few weeks arising out of the Military Learning and Innovation Roundtable held at the Joint Services Command and Staff College on Wednesday 17 June 2015. The roundtable explored the various ways in which armed forces have learned, adapted, and innovated in times… Read More Organizational Culture and Learning during the First World War
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