DR CHRIS TUCK The concepts of ‘victory’ and ‘defeat’ are fundamental to effective strategy; winning, after all, is surely one of the key objectives of having a strategy for an armed conflict. In addition, reaching some accurate consensus on whether we are winning or losing provides one of the crucial steps for understanding if our… Read More Gender, Victory, and Defeat
DR EDWARD BURKE Dr Burke is Assistant Professor in International Relations at the University of Nottingham. ‘An Army of Tribes: British Army Cohesion, Deviancy and Murder in Northern Ireland’ is published in paperback by Liverpool University Press, and is available here. Today’s officers in the British Army who served in Northern Ireland during Operation Banner… Read More ‘Counter-Insurgency Against Kith and Kin’: British Army Combat and Cohesion in Northern Ireland
DR MIKE FINCH One of the most salient features of warfare during the present decade appears to be breakdown of the barrier between the state of war and the state of peace. As Chief of the General Staff Sir Nick Carter noted in his foreword to Army Doctrine Publication: Operations: ‘No longer is there a… Read More French Revolutionary War Theory: Conflict Between War and Peace
DR DAVID WHETHAM is Reader in Military Ethics and Director of the King’s Centre for Military Ethics. Editorial note: This article contains content some readers may find upsetting. In the latest volume to come out in the book series from the European Chapter of the International Society for Military Ethics, I write about the… Read More Coalitions and Ethical Relativism: Challenges for Those on the Ground
The King’s College Research Centre for the History of Conflict will be hosting a symposium, ‘Armed Forces and the Cold War: Operations and Legacies’, at the JSCSC in the Tedder Lecture Theatre on 13th July 2016. All staff and students are warmly invited to attend. DR GERAINT HUGHES In the autumn of 1972 Shah Reza… Read More All the Shah’s Men: The Imperial Iranian Brigade Group in the Dhofar War
DR KATE UTTING In the past information, influence or non-kinetic psychological aspects of conflict had a supporting function to the physical, kinetic aspects; today it is seen as central. Militaries have done ‘influence’ for years, but there is a dominant view that in the current information environment all actions, deeds and words are scrutinised in… Read More Palestine 1945-48: the Information Campaign and the Limits of Influence
DR CHRISTINA GOULTER As Dr Huw Davies suggested in this post, how successfully the British armed forces incorporate their recent experience of counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq into doctrine and planning is likely to shape future perceptions of those campaigns. The fight against the Taliban has not ended, even for the West, because some advisory work by… Read More COUNTER-INSURGENCY: A QUESTION OF VICTORY
DR JEFFREY MICHAELS AND DR ANDREW GAWTHORPE In a recent article in a special issue of Small Wars & Insurgencies, we considered the contribution Hollywood has made to our understanding of counterinsurgency and nation-building during the Vietnam War. The war has been the subject of so many blockbuster films that it is inevitable that they… Read More Film Portrayals of Counterinsurgency and Nation-building in Vietnam
Defence-In-Depth 