Search

The principles and formalities of modern U.S. Defence planning stem from the 1960s and have largely served well. This paper, however, is about the special challenges that arise when major changes have been needed, some even transformational in character. It discusses how changing realities, independent studies and analysis, events, leaders, and political processes have led to changes not easily instigated within normal processes. Several examples are discussed for the period 1976-2016. Today, the United States and allies again face major challenges that require major military changes. Those have not yet been decided, much less accomplished. The paper draws on lessons from earlier periods to identify obstacles to and mechanisms for change. The last section focuses on defence analysis, which has sometimes been an obstacle but can be part of the solution. The paper urges a new ethic for analysis and the analysts who perform it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with the security dynamics underlying the use of drones and their impact on security subjects – individuals and groups that are the ultimate recipients of specific security policies, regardless of whether these have beneficial effects on them. Using Mark Duffield’s distinction between the insured Global North and the non-insured Global South, this paper discusses how drones generate a radical dissociation between the intervener and the intervened that ultimately produces new security environments at the margins of the international system. These new security environments are defined by the articulation between space, technologies and bodies: bodies of invisible subjects; bodies that are uninsurable. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Explores the changes affected by the National Security Council paper 68 or NSC 68, which assessed the political-military strategy of the United States under the administration of President Harry Truman. Restoration of American military power; Rationale for US national security for much of the Cold War; US Army's balanced-force approach; Arguments for a new military structure.

The nature of warfare is changing, with a far greater threat to international security posed by terrorists, in particular al Qaeda. This paper sets out to expose the deficiencies in perusing traditional concepts of deterrence that served the West well during the Cold War, but which are no longer relevant. It exposes the differences in approach either side of 9/11, setting out the challenges and proposing modern, well-orchestrated strategies, which will be successful in a contemporary context. This paper advocates a new concept of 'detercion', as one method by which the West may bring about the defeat of global terrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the new (2013) Japan's National Security Strategy and its relationship with the actual changes in the regional and global strategic landscape. The connections between the new Japanese perspectives on the subject and the recent U.S decision to focus its military Power in the Asia Pacific region will be specially stressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoinstitutionalists applying the logic of rational choice institutionalism have leavened our understanding of public agency design and evolution in the domestic and national security policy domains. This paper seeks to advance theory building in empirically grounded ways by assessing the explanatory power of an important theoretical perspective (rational choice institutionalism), in an understudied “hybrid” policy domain where domestic and national security aims interact (domestic environmental policy and national security policy), and in an organizational type (the U.S. military) that has drawn scant attention from students of bureaucracy in political science, public administration, or public management. Analysis of three major efforts to green the U.S. military suggests that the patterns of politics accompanying agency evolution involving hybrid policy domains differ from domestic and national security domains in ways that limit the generalizability of rational choice institutionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 2003, the US government launched a military invasion and occupation of Iraq. This was one more phase of the US National Security Strategy doctrine that promises militarism, war, and disruption in various sovereign states. These wars abroad and the unprecedented powers of government and police agencies in the USA represent powerful intersections of patriarchal authority, racism, militarism, and elitism. Africana communities have a long history of resisting repression both directly and indirectly related to US foreign policy. Social scientists writing from a black feminist perspective have described how such mutually constructing forces of race, class, gender, and nation have influenced the lives of people of color, women, and the poor in American society and have highlighted the historical and sociological importance of resistance by these oppressed groups. Specifically, this paper addresses ways in which a black feminist analysis and praxis offer useful perspectives on activism concerning issues of peace and justice post 9–11–2001. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of precision-guided munitions (PGMs) and information operations (IO) has enabled the formulation of new operational concepts. It explores how the concepts being developed by the United States rest upon skillful manipulation of an adversary through precision targeting. Such strategies, while elegant, constitute a major increase in the complexity of military planning and operational execution. Moreover, different theories of causation within the international system affect the development of national strategy, military strategy, and the specific selection and engagement of targets. Strategies of manipulation also demand distinctly different capabilities from strategies of annihilation, and therefore entail opportunity costs that must be considered in the Department of Defense's transformation agenda. The paper concludes that while strategies of manipulation may appeal to US strategists and war-planners, the long-term consequences of their adoption may have the unintended effect of concentrating military force against civilian populations and infrastructure, increasing the sensitivity of US warplans to adversaries' adaptations, and decreasing the flexibility and dynamism of US military forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central concern of this paper is with what factors give momentum to the chain of decisions which result in a weapon that goes against the standards of performance. The defense policy literature suggests that the variations in the performance of American military hardware are tied to the government's difficulties in resolving fundamental disagreements on strategic and doctrinal matters, variations in the technological demands of military projects, and the need for bargaining and coalition building. These relationships yield three hypotheses which are tested using simple bivariate analysis. With the caveats appropriate to a small sample of cases, the hypotheses are stated as relations between conditions rather than as correlations, and the findings are suggestive. The data support all three of the primary hypotheses. The study concludes with reform recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]