by DR HUW J. DAVIES Research on how militaries learn, adapt, innovate and transform has been gathering pace in recent years. The primary motivation for this emerging interest has been the need to understand the means and methods by which the US Army innovated or transformed during its campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Further studies… Read More Conference Report: Military Education and Empire.
DR ALISON HAWKS —The data presented here was drawn from a large-scale study of armed private security contractors, of which this blog post is one aspect. The study set out to explore the perceptions and realities of being a private security contractor after military service. Of the men and women who completed the survey (n=1516),… Read More What Private Security Contracting can Teach Us About Recruitment and Retention in the Armed Forces
DR ROD THORNTON This is a reduced version of an article by the same author in the Aug-Sept edition of the Royal United Services Institute Journal, entitled, ‘The Changing Nature of Modern Warfare: Responding to Russian Information Warfare’. The way in which Russia seized Crimea and created chaos in eastern Ukraine in 2014 brought to world attention… Read More RUSSIAN HYBRID WARFARE
The operational level of war and the operational art are key concepts of Western military doctrine and consequently form important areas of study in staff colleges around the world. To stimulate discussion and debate about these important ideas, authors from the Defence Studies Department are exploring the continued utility of these concepts. In this third post,… Read More Operational Art: Pinheads and Angels
The operational level of war and the operational art are key concepts of Western military doctrine and consequently form important areas of study in staff colleges around the world. To stimulate discussion and debate about these important ideas, authors from the Defence Studies Department are exploring the continued utility of these concepts. In this second… Read More Operational Art and the Operational Level: The Case for the Defence
The operational level of war and the operational art are key concepts of Western military doctrine and consequently form important areas of study in staff colleges around the world. To stimulate discussion and debate about these important ideas, authors from the Defence Studies Department will explore the continued utility of these concepts in two posts.… Read More Operational Level and Operational Art: Still Useful Today?
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
BLEDDYN BOWEN The politics of war and peace in space is an overlooked field. Space is a quiet and lonely place in war studies – despite space systems performing critical infrastructure roles in war, peace, politics, economics, and nuclear stability. In the mid-1990s John Sheldon and Colin Gray bemoaned the fact that there is no… Read More Clausewitz in Orbit: Spacepower Theory and Strategic Education
by DR KENNETH PAYNE Behavioural economics is all the rage these days. Thanks in large part to the Nobel prize winning research of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, economics has discovered some powerful insights about how humans really behave when it comes to making life choices. That is really behave, as opposed to the dominant approach hitherto, which was to assume… Read More Behavioural Strategy: Exploring the Psychology of Strategy
by DR ROBERT T. FOLEY Many organisations like to describe themselves as ‘learning organisations;’ however, very few are actually good at organisational learning. One of the key challenges facing any organisation is how to take the knowledge and experience of individuals and spread this throughout a group so that everyone learns. This problems is particularly… Read More Clausewitz and Learning Through Communities of Practice
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