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Why did the U.S. war in Afghanistan last so long, and why did it end? In contrast to conventional arguments about partisanship, geopolitics, and elite pressures, a new theory of war duration suggests that strategic narratives best answer these questions. The severity and frequency of attacks by al-Qaeda and the Islamic State across most of the 2000s and 2010s generated and sustained a robust collective narrative across the United States focused on combatting terrorism abroad. Audience costs of inaction generated by this narrative pushed President Barack Obama (2009) and President Donald Trump (2017) to not only sustain but increase troops in Afghanistan, against their better judgement. Strategic narratives also explain the end to the war. The defeat of the ISIS caliphate and a significant reduction in the number of attacks on liberal democratic states in the late 2010s caused the severity and frequency of traumatic events to fall below the threshold necessary to sustain a robust anti-terrorism narrative. As the narrative weakened, advocates for war in Afghanistan lost political salience, while those pressing retrenchment gained leverage over policy. Audience costs for inaction declined and President Joe Biden ended the war (2021). As President Biden seeks to rebalance U.S. commitments for an era of new strategic challenges, an active offshore counterterrorism program will be necessary to maintain this balance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some winning rebel groups build obedient and effective state militaries after civil war, while others suffer military defections? When winning rebels face intense security threats during civil wars, rebel field commanders are more likely to remain obedient during war-to-peace transitions. Intense security threats incentivize militants to create more inclusive leadership structures, reducing field commanders' incentives to defect in the postwar period. Intense security threats also reduce commanders' capacity for postwar resistance by forcing insurgents to remain mobile and adopt shorter time horizons in rebel-governed territory, reducing the likelihood that field commanders will develop local ties and independent support bases. The plausibility of the argument is examined using a new list of winning rebel groups since 1946. Two case studies—Zimbabwe and Côte d'Ivoire—probe the causal mechanisms of the theory. The study contributes to debates about the consequences of military victory in civil war, the postwar trajectories of armed groups, and the conditions necessary for civil-military cohesion in fragile states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship on artificial intelligence (AI) and international security focuses on the political and ethical consequences of replacing human warriors with machines. Yet AI is not a simple substitute for human decision-making. The advances in commercial machine learning that are reducing the costs of statistical prediction are simultaneously increasing the value of data (which enable prediction) and judgment (which determines why prediction matters). But these key complements—quality data and clear judgment—may not be present, or present to the same degree, in the uncertain and conflictual business of war. This has two important strategic implications. First, military organizations that adopt AI will tend to become more complex to accommodate the challenges of data and judgment across a variety of decision-making tasks. Second, data and judgment will tend to become attractive targets in strategic competition. As a result, conflicts involving AI complements are likely to unfold very differently than visions of AI substitution would suggest. Rather than rapid robotic wars and decisive shifts in military power, AI-enabled conflict will likely involve significant uncertainty, organizational friction, and chronic controversy. Greater military reliance on AI will therefore make the human element in war even more important, not less. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do electoral politics affect presidential decisionmaking in war? As both commander in chief and elected officeholder, presidents must inevitably balance competing objectives of the national interest and political survival when assessing alternative military strategies in war. Yet, how and when electoral pressures influence decisionmaking during an ongoing conflict remains unclear. Drawn from the logic of democratic accountability, two mechanisms of constraint may be inferred. First, presidents may delay making decisions that are perceived to carry excessive electoral risk. Second, electoral pressures may have a dampening effect, causing presidents to water down politically sensitive courses of action to minimize any expected backlash. Recently declassified documents and interviews with senior administration officials and military figures illustrate these mechanisms in a case study of decisionmaking during the second half of the Iraq War. Both George W. Bush's surge decision of 2007 and Barack Obama's decision to withdraw troops in 2011 are shown to have been profoundly influenced by concerns related to the domestic political calendar. These findings call for further study of the nuanced ways in which the electoral cycle shapes wartime decisionmaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which discusses articles in the issue on topics including China's changing strategy for counterterrorism; the cold war in the Middle East, 1969–77; and military strategy.

Since 1949, China has adopted nine national military strategies, known as "strategic guidelines." The strategies adopted in 1956,1980, and 1993 represent major changes in China's military strategy, or efforts by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to wage war in a new way. Shifts in the conduct of warfare in the international system offer one explanation for why China, a developing country for most of this period, pursued major change in its military strategy. Such shifts in the conduct of warfare should be especially powerful if a gap exists between a state's current strategy and the requirements of future warfare. The PLA has only been able to change strategy, however, when the Chinese Communist Party leadership is united and agrees on basic policies and the structure of authority. When the party is united, it delegates substantial responsibility for military affairs to the PLA leadership, which changes or adjusts military strategy in response to changes in China's security environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates over how governments can defeat insurgencies ebb and flow with international events, becoming particularly contentious when the United States encounters problems in its efforts to support a counterinsurgent government. Often the United States confronts these problems as a zero-sum game in which the government and the insurgents compete for popular support and cooperation. The U.S. prescription for success has had two main elements: to support liberalizing, democratizing reforms to reduce popular grievances; and to pursue a military strategy that carefully targets insurgents while avoiding harming civilians. An analysis of contemporaneous documents and interviews with participants in three cases held up as models of the governance approach-- Malaya, Dhofar, and El Salvador--shows that counterinsurgency success is the result of a violent process of state building in which elites contest for power, popular interests matter little, and the government benefits from uses of force against civilians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding deterrence and dissuasion in cyberspace is often difficult because our minds are captured by Cold War images of massive retaliation to a nuclear attack by nuclear means. The analogy to nuclear deterrence is misleading, however, because many aspects of cyber behavior are more like other behaviors, such as crime, that states try (imperfectly) to deter. Preventing harm in cyberspace involves four complex mechanisms: threats of punishment, denial, entanglement, and norms. Even when punishment is used, deterrent threats need not be limited to cyber responses, and they may address general behavior as well as specific acts. Cyber threats are plentiful, often ambiguous, and difficult to attribute. Problems of attribution are said to limit deterrence and dissuasion in the cyber domain, but three of the major means—denial by defense, entanglement, and normative taboos—are not strongly hindered by the attribution problem. The effectiveness of different mechanisms depends on context, and the question of whether deterrence works in cyberspace depends on "who and what." Not all cyberattacks are of equal importance; not all can be deterred; and not all rise to the level of significant national security threats. The lesson for policymakers is to focus on the most important attacks and to understand the context in which such attacks may occur and the full range of mechanisms available to prevent them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers decaptitation, the counterterrorism strategy in which governments focus on the killing or capture of leaders of terrorist groups. The use of this strategy the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama is noted. The efficacy of decapitation is examined. Leadership, organizational ecology and terrorism research concepts are employed to measure the effectiveness of decapitation. It is found that eliminating leaders of terrorist organizations has a significant impact on their ability to function or to continue in existence.

Scholars have long argued about why the United States pursued a conventional military strategy during the Vietnam War rather than one based on counterinsurgency principles. A recent article in this journal by Jonathan Caverley presents a bold challenge to the historiography of the Vietnam War. Rejecting the standard historical focus on the organizational culture and strategic perspective of Gen. William Westmoreland and the U.S. Army, Caverley argues that the roots of the United States' strategy in Vietnam can be traced to the direct influence of civilian leaders and the strong constraint of public opinion. Caverley's main arguments are a welcome challenge to the established wisdom, but they are not supported by the historical evidence. Civilian officials in Lyndon Johnson's administration did not instruct the military on how to fight the ground war within the borders of South Vietnam. Westmoreland did not want to change U.S. military strategy to focus on pacification at the expense of search and destroy tactics and the main force war. Both U.S. civilian and military officials were convinced that counterinsurgency was a South Vietnamese responsibility that U.S. ground forces should not assume. Public opinion was a weak, rather than a strong, constraint on the specific decisions of the Johnson administration during the pivotal years of the Vietnam War. Democracies may not be able to win certain counterinsurgency conflicts, but the primary source of this failure is not a civilian aversion to casualties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Iraq War has received little sustained analysis from scholars of international relations. I assess the rationalist approach to war--or, simply, bargaining theory--as one possible explanation of the conflict. Bargaining theory correctly directs attention to the inherently strategic nature of all wars. It also highlights problems of credible commitment and asymmetric information that lead conflicts of interest, ubiquitous in international relations, to turn violent. These strategic interactions were central to the outbreak of the Iraq War in 2003. Nonetheless, bargaining theory is inadequate as an explanation of the Iraq War. Although the problem of credible commitment was real, it could not be solved because of the prior beliefs of the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein was uniquely evil and because of Saddam's inability to signal accurately to multiple audiences, both factors now outside bargaining theory. Nor was the problem of private information an important impediment to bargaining; rather, the information failures observed in both Washington and Baghdad were of their own making as each formed self-deluding beliefs and expectations. Bargaining theory also ignores postwar governance costs and domestic interest groups, both of which contributed to the war. All of these problems require either considerable amendments to the theory or the revision of core assumptions. Drawing on this critique, the final sections draw out the analytic and policy lessons of the Iraq War and suggest, most importantly, the need for a new behavioral theory of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cost distribution theory suggests that the costs to the median voter in a democracy of fighting an insurgency with firepower are relatively low compared to a more labor-intensive approach. Therefore, this voter will favor a capital-intensive counterinsurgency campaign despite the resulting diminished prospects of victory. Primary and secondary sources show that President Lyndon Johnson and his civilian aides were very much aware that, although they considered a main force-focused and firepower-intensive strategy to be largely ineffective against the insurgency in South Vietnam, it was politically more popular in the United States. Importantly, civil-military agreement on warfighting strategy does not undermine this explanation, which assumes that civilian leaders, and ultimately the public, play an essential role in that strategy's determination. Appointing and supporting Gen. William Westmoreland was just one means by which the Johnson administration ensured that the U.S. military emphasized the fight against conventional enemy units and relied on the use of firepower for the fight against Vietcong insurgents. Civil-military disagreements over strategy, however rare, therefore provide the essential test of cost distribution theory's explanatory power. When officials suggested that the U.S. military adopt more labor-intensive pacification approaches to fight the insurgency, the Johnson administration rejected them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A capital- and firepower-intensive military doctrine is, in general, poorly suited for combating an insurgency. It is therefore puzzling that democracies, particularly the United States, tenaciously pursue such a suboptimal strategy over long periods of time and in successive conflicts. This tendency poses an empirical challenge to the argument that democracies tend to win the conflicts they enter. This apparently nonstrategic behavior results from a condition of moral hazard owing to the shifting of costs away from the average voter. The voter supports the use of a capital-intensive doctrine in conflicts where its effectiveness is low because the decreased likelihood of winning is out-weighed by the lower costs of fighting. This theory better explains the development of the United States' counterinsurgency strategy in Vietnam during Lyndon Johnson's administration compared to the dominant interpretation, which blames the U.S. military's myopic bureaucracy and culture for its counterproductive focus on firepower and conventional warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars typically define appeasement as a policy of satisfying grievances through one-sided concessions to avoid war for the foreseeable future and, therefore, as an alternative to balancing. They traditionally interpret British appeasement of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s as a naïve attempt to maintain peace with Germany by satisfying his grievances. The standard conceptualization of appeasement and the empirical treatment of the 1930s, however, are theoretically limiting and historically incorrect. Appeasement is a strategy of sustained, asymmetrical concessions with the aim of avoiding war, at least in the short term. There are three distinct variations of appeasement: (1) resolving grievances (to avoid war for the foreseeable future); (2) diffusing secondary threats (to focus on a greater threat); and (3) buying time (to rearm and/or secure allies against the current threat). British appeasement was primarily a strategy of buying time for rearmament against Germany. British leaders understood the Nazi menace and did not expect that appeasement would avoid an eventual war with Germany. They believed that by the time of the Rhineland crisis of 1936 the balance of power had already shifted in Germany's favor, but that British rearmament would work to reverse the balance by the end of the decade. Appeasement was a strategy to delay an expected confrontation with Germany until the military balance was more favorable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author explores the validity of assumptions that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan forced Japan to surrender to Allied forces, and thus ended the war in the Pacific during World War II. He discusses the historiography of the historic event during three periods. He explores the idea of whether the use of atomic weapons was an effective military strategy and if deterrence is an effective military theory. He also points out that both the U.S. and Russia lost wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan respectively, where it was not practical to bring nuclear arms to bear.

The article discusses the hegemonic grand strategy in the U.S. The author notes that since the Cold War's end, most US grand strategists believe that American hegemony is exceptional and therefore the US will need not worry about the other states that engage in balancing the counterhegemonic. He points out that US hegemony has a problem because it wields hegemonic power and inorder to reduce its fear, the US must accept some reduction by adopting a multipolar system.

The article examines the strategies of terrorism. The author states that terrorism is designed to change minds by destroying bodies, like a form of signaling. Terrorists employ five strategies of signaling: intimidation, provocation, spoiling, attrition and outbidding. The main targets of persuasion are the population and enemy that the terrorists hope to represent or control.

The article discusses the causes of the civilian victimization during wars. Civilian victimization, as defined, is a wartime strategy that targets and kills noncombatants. Two reason are identified as causes; first, civilian victimization results from desperation to win; and second, belligerents' appetite for territorial conquest leads to civilian victimization when the territory they seek to annex is inhabited by enemy noncombatants.

The article examines twenty-four military occupations to study the critical role of commonly perceived external threat in determining occupation success. Occupation success is largely influenced by structural factors that occupying powers cannot easily manipulate. To the extent they can, great powers must therefore carefully choose places to occupy where the threat environment is conducive to occupation success. Occupying powers can increase their chances of success both by pursuing a wartime strategy that creates an environment welcoming to occupation and by employing strategies, such as contingent withdrawal, that make their pledges to create an independent, indigenous government more credible.

Argues that the best predictor of assymetric conflict outcomes is strategic interaction. Interaction of actor strategies during a conflict; Theoretical and policy implications of the strategic interaction thesis.

Surveys ten critiques that throw the practicability of strategy into question. Definition of strategy; Importance of strategy on war; Relationship between strategies and outcomes in war; Reasons why is it so hard to use strategy to integrate ends and means; Practice of strategy against cumulative weight of criticisms; Reflections on the implications of a dismal view of the limits of strategy.

Examines how strategic culture might affect states' choices between offensive and defensive military doctrine. Illustration from the French army doctrine during the 1920s and 1930s; Civilian concerns about the allocation of military power.

Focuses on the analytic value of strategic culture in international security studies. Conceptual and methodological problems in the literature on strategic culture; Relationship between strategic culture and behavior.

Explains the conditions under which accidents can cause inadvertent escalation of warfare. Existing theories of inadvertence; Traditional approaches to inadvertent escalation; Comparative cases involving inadvertence in submarine, aerial and chemical warfare between Great Britain and Germany in World War II; Contemporary inadvertence.

The article focuses on how the strategies of Iraqi and American forces in the Gulf War are governed by a sensitivity to the political context domestically and internationally. It is expected that Iraqi forces will only be removed from Kuwait following a ferocious land battle. This situation has created a severe risk of high American casualties, given that the U.S. provides the bulk of the coalition forces against Iraq. The author stresses that such risk has put President George Bush administration under intense pressure to adopt a strategy to reduce the casualties while it suggests opportunities for Iraq.

The article focuses on the foreign policy goals that the United States should follow after the Cold War. The cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union lasted for forty five years with the United States winning the battle. The first goal given by the author is on security, he states that United States is secure because of the geographical isolation and their nuclear weapons and that the only threat to United States are the nuclear threats. Another goal given by the author is the preservation of the industrialized world's open international economic order.

The article features the developments and instability of the Balkan Peninsula. The region is known to be a place of instability and ferment, and with the end of the Cold War there is a possibility that long-standing conflicts are likely to re-emerge in the region. During the 19th century, it became the site of power rivalry among great nations such as Britain, Russia and Austria aimed at extending their influence and power in the region. The greedy ambition for power and assertive nationalism is one of the primary factors that contributed to the outbreak of World War I. The region is also known as the powder keg of Europe.

The article discusses the developments of nations after the fall of Berlin Wall. Several peacekeeping attempts were done by several communist nations around the world including the end of the communist regime in Berlin, Soviet forces readiness to withdraw all its forces from Eastern Europe by 1995 and the unification of Germany through the Warsaw Pact. These transformations are made possible through the efforts made by the super power nations such as the U.S., Great Britain and Japan. Concerns are raised by intellectuals regarding the possibility that the historic warlike ways will return once the superpowers are gone.

The article focuses on the principal developments in the U.S. Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP)-6 through to SIOP-6F of October 1, 1989, and some of the more pertinent developments in strategic nuclear weapons and C systems. They include a much greater emphasis by the Ronald Reagan and George Bush administration on the ability to destroy the Soviet political and military command and control system at any point in the strategic nuclear exchange, changes in the U.S. force structure, and new computer capabilities which permit rapid retargeting of the U.S. strategic nuclear forces. The new SIOP, as well as the current trends in U.S. targeting concepts and the associated developments in strategic nuclear weapons and C systems is also assessed.

The article focuses on the impact of the U.S. development of B-2 stealth bomber and stealthy cruise missiles on the air defense strategy of the Soviet Air Defense Troops (VPVO). It is inferred that the current force structure of VPVO was shaped by external threats, such as the large U.S. bomber force, and internal factors, including Soviet doctrine, technology, and institutional inertia. It is inferred that the VPVO has developed in accord with its missions, institutional interests, and military doctrine upon knowing the U.S. initiatives. In addition, the VPVO was reorganized in 1980s to offer a strong and centralized service and to reflect their original purpose, defending the key regions of the Soviet Union against nuclear bomb attack.

The article presents a framework for the evaluation of the U.S. commitment in developing stealthy aircraft and cruise missiles. In addition, it offers substantial information and logic to support a judgment that stealth technology holds a promise of major geostrategic importance. It describes the indirect benefits and costs that are significant in the evaluation. Finally, it discusses the value of the first increment of the stealth aircraft in operation with non-stealth aircraft, the impact of the U.S. program on Soviet military doctrine, the competitive strategy aspects of the aircraft on Soviet costs and programs, and the value of stealth in enhancing deterrence of theater conflict as well as strategic nuclear conflict.

The Bush administration, on March 25, 2005, announced a major new policy approach toward South Asia, which included the dramatic announcement of its intention to help India become a major world power in the twenty-first century. Senior officials gave notice that the United States would support Indian requests for transformative systems in area such as command and control, early warning and missile defense.

Three propositions that challenge the prevailing view that major powers cannot balance against the United States is presented. The Bush strategy of aggressive unilateralism is changing the United States long-enjoyed reputation for benign intent and giving other major powers reason to fear its power.

An argument that since the end of the Cold War, second-tier major powers such as China, France, Germany, India, and Russia have mostly abandoned traditional 'hard balancing', based on countervailing alliances and arms buildups at the systemic level is presented. Analysis suggests that in the post-Cold War era, second-tier major power states are increasingly resorting to soft-balancing strategies to counter the growing military might and unilateralist tendencies of the US without harming their economic ties with it.

A correction is presented to the article "Assuring Assured Retaliation: China's Nuclear Posture and U.S.-China Strategic Stability," by Fiona S. Cunningham and Taylor Fravel, that was published in a previous issue.

The article discusses the topics published within the issue, including one by Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh on the strategies employed by Iraq and the U.S.-led coalition in the 1991 Gulf War and another by Richard Herrmann on the examination of the U.S. political strategies during and after the Gulf War.