Misapplying lessons learned? Analysing the utility of British counterinsurgency strategy in Northern Ireland, 1971–76

This article examines the British Army's deployment in support of the civil power in Northern Ireland. It argues that the core guiding principles of the British approach to counterinsurgency (COIN) – employing the minimum use of force, firm and timely action, and unity of control in civil–military relations – were misapplied by the Army in its haste to combat Irish Republican Army (IRA) terrorism between 1971 and 1976. Moreover, it suggests that the Army's COIN strategy was unsuccessful in the 1970s because commanders adhered too closely to the customs, doctrine, and drill applied under very different circumstances in Aden between 1963 and 1967, generally regarded as a failure in Britain's post-war internal security operations. The article concludes with a discussion of the British government's decision to scale back the Army's role in favour of giving the Royal Ulster Constabulary primacy in counter-terrorist operations, a decision which led ultimately to success in combating IRA violence.     

Programming the procurement of airlift and sealift forces: A linear programming model for analysis of the least-cost mix of strategic deployment systems

A linear programming model for analyzing the strategic deployment mix of airlift and sealift forces and prepositioning to accomplish the composite requirements of a set of possible contingencies is described in this paper. It solves for the least-cost mix of deployment means capable of meeting any one of a spectrum of contingencies, or meeting simultaneous contingencies. The model was developed by RAC as part of the U.S. Army's study program and has been used in analyses of deployment systems conducted in support of the U.S. Army, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Results of analyses have influenced the preparation of long-range plans as well as the formulation of the FY67 Department of Defense budget. The paper gives the background and assumptions of the model, describes the model by means of a simple hypothetical example followed by a selected subset of a complete version, and discusses how the model is used.     

Making long-range planning work: the case of the US Army's 30-year strategic modernization plan

The extensive timespan of evolving assumptions about future adversaries, US military engagements, and technology inherent in the US Army's 30-year modernization strategy can overwhelm the management capacity of planners, and misdirect acquisition investments. Some military scholars have argued that long-range planning is futile due to the complexities of the global security environment. So how can the US Army manage the evolving assumptions inherent in its 30-year modernization strategy to ensure it remains a superior global force? This study will answer the above question by arguing that the US Army's 30-year modernization strategy, while emulative of a similar modernization approach in the threat-based planning environment of the Cold War, is viable if supported by a method and a tool that manage investments and planning assumptions.     

Livelihood systems of enlisted Ugandan Army soldiers: honour and reform of the UPDF

This article explores the livelihood pathways of serving Ugandan Army soldiers and traces their methods and motivations for enlistment. All were from areas of northern Uganda affected by nearly two decades of violent instability. With the Uganda People's Defence Forces (UPDF) increasing recruitment eligibility requirements and taking other measures to improve professionalism, some soldiers enlisted using false credentials and names, travelled to skirt unofficial ethnic quotas, and joined against their family's wishes. The Army's defence reform process was intended to preclude such problems. The article concludes with reflections on what strategic deception (by both recruits and the Army) may imply for warriors' honour.     

Scheduling peacetime rotation of Pakistan army units

Because Pakistan has varying climates and terrains, the Pakistan Army rotates its units between peacetime locations so that no unit endures inequitable hardship or enjoys unfair advantage. Army policy specifies strict constraints on unit rotations, such as the length of a unit's stay in any location, the number of units moving at any time, and the allowable replacements for any moving unit. Scheduling rotations manually in accordance with these rules, as is currently practiced, is extremely difficult and time consuming. This article presents an integer programming model that finds feasible, minimum-cost schedules for the Pakistan Army's desired planning horizons. The model also ensures that the units are positioned at the end of the planning horizon so that feasible schedules exist for future planners. The model is implemented with commercially available optimization software. Schedules are obtained for realistic test problems in less than an hour on a personal computer. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

The Changing Pakistan Army Officer Corps

The Pakistan Army elicits many concerns about terrorism, nuclear and the coherence of the state. However, very little is actually known about this institution. This article mobilizes unique data to address one important facet: the Army's geographical recruitment base. We find that the Pakistan Army has been successful at expanding the geographical recruitment base while some groups (namely those who are native to Sindh) remain highly under-represented. We also find that the officer corps is increasingly coming from urban areas. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these important shifts subject to the limitations of our data.     

Operation Motorman (1972) and the search for a coherent British counterinsurgency strategy in Northern Ireland

The role of the British Army in Northern Ireland during Operation Banner (1969–2007) is an instructive case study of counterinsurgency operations as well as an important chapter in recent British military history. Given troops deployed to the province as aid to the civil power, it is particularly useful in discussions about the principle of minimum force. This article seeks to explore the issue of minimum force through the example of Operation Motorman, the Army's successful attempt to remove the barricades, which had established so-go areas for the security forces in Northern Ireland.     

‘Restoring normalcy’: The evolution of the Indian army's counterinsurgency doctrine

The Indian Army has a uniquely political approach to counterinsurgency that has had great success. This essay examines the development of this doctrine over the last five decades, and the political and operational factors that influenced its development. The most important of these factors was, and remains, the Army's positional‐war orientation, which puts great emphasis on the need to prepare for conventional war. Though the doctrine has undergone some evolution, such changes have been constrained by the positional‐war orientation.     

The sources of the Australian tradition in irregular warfare, 1942–1974

This article had its genesis in a background study for the development of a new Australian Army counter-insurgency doctrine. Archival research showed that the Australian counter-insurgency doctrine employed in such post-1945 conflicts as Burma, Malaya, Borneo and Vietnam originated in the jungle campaigns of the South West Pacific Area during World War II. The historical record also showed that the Army's counter-insurgency doctrine, as with its World War II-jungle warfare doctrine, was a pragmatic amalgam of Australian experience and British doctrine. The article traces this process through the development of a series of doctrine manuals. It also considers the contribution of key individuals to both counter-insurgency theory and practice. This distinctively Australian approach to the development of doctrine was responsible for producing a highly successful manual, The Division in Battle: Pamphlet No. 11, Counter-Revolutionary Warfare (DIB 11), which the Army used during its involvement in Vietnam.     

Institutional Analysis and Irregular Warfare: A Case Study of the French Army in Algeria 1954–1960

This article proposes a case study to illustrate the usefulness of sociological institutional analysis as a method to uncover ‘blue force’ challenges to deal with irregular warfare. The French Army's adaptation to revolutionary warfare in Algeria, starting in 1954, is used to illustrate both the application of the methodology and how institutional forces can hinder as well as overwhelm transformation for irregular warfare. The analysis emphasizes three key dimensions of the French Army's institutional adaptation: the regulative, normative and cognitive. These empirical elements are used to show how they interacted and influenced the institutional implementation of the French COIN structures.     

Bayonets on Musa Dagh: Ottoman Counterinsurgency Operations – 1915

This article examines the Ottoman military's escalatory response to violence and frames the Armenian insurrection of 1915 in the historical context of contemporary early twentieth-century counterinsurgency campaigns. A case study is presented, from a military historian's perspective, of counterinsurgency operations conducted by the Ottoman Army's 41st Infantry Division against Armenian insurgents on Musa Da? (Musa Dagh) in an operational area south of Iskenderun (Alexandretta). In this particular operational area, it appears that the modern label which most closely approximates what happened there is ethnic cleansing. Finally, the article concludes with an objective assessment of the effectiveness of the Ottoman Army's counterinsurgency operations.     

The Amritsar Massacre and the minimum force debate

This article re-examines one of the most infamous incidents in British imperial history: the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, and analyses it within the context of the British Army's minimum force philosophy. The massacre has long been regarded as the most catastrophic failure of minimum force in the history of the British Army. This article reconsiders the arguments over the shooting at Amritsar and the role of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, and questions the accepted view that the massacre was such a failure of minimum force. It argues that the circumstances surrounding the massacre must be understood before judging the incident and given these factors it is possible to see it within a minimum force framework.     

试论武器装备的效费比分析

运用价值工程(VE)方法分析武器装备,称效费比为价值。按照杜佩(Dupuy)的方法,把武器装备的效能转化为“战斗效能值”(OLI),又计算出了武器装备的全寿命费用,然后将2者加以对比,获得效能—费用的最佳组合,同时提出了选择武器装备系统的定量分析方法。这些对于提高我国国防经济效益,具有一定的指导和借鉴意义。     

Uncovering foreign military innovation

An analysis of US assessments of Germany's development of armored warfare illustrates the problems that intelligence agencies face as they attempt to understand military innovation. The covert nature of German Army's tank research in the years immediately following World War I limited the number of indicators of Berlin's interest in armored warfare. Similarly, the United States possessed at best a fragmentary picture of German experimentation with armor. By the outbreak of World War II, however, US military attaches had nonetheless developed an accurate understanding of German concepts of armored warfare. If the United States is to avoid strategic surprise in the future, it must cultivate intelligence sources and employ considerably different methods from those of the Cold War.     

Keep the change: Counterinsurgency,Iraq, and historical understanding

This article explores the historical reasoning behind counterinsurgency thinking, particularly as applied to Iraq, using Douglas Porch's book, Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War as a reference point. It argues that the classic historical analogies of counterinsurgency theory were inapt in dealing with the conflict in Iraq, and that the historical reasoning behind counterinsurgency more generally deserves greater scrutiny. Not only are the analogies of questionable applicability, but the evidence of causation in prior conflicts is ultimately unproveable. In the end, Counterinsurgency theory and the US Army's Field Manual 3-24 on Counterinsurgency were politically useful during the ‘Surge’, beginning in 2007, but remain intellectually and historically problematic.     

美军“爱国者”导弹武器系统维修保障研究

美国及其他军事强国都将导弹武器系统维修保障作为每年国防投入的重点内容之一,维修保障也已成为国外军工企业拓展军品产业链、保障企业持续获得收入的重要业务之一。“爱国者”导弹武器系统作为美军防空的主战装备,研究维修保障主要做法能够揭示美军导弹武器系统维修保障状况。从“爱国者”导弹武器系统的两级维修体制、陆军延寿计划两大方面分析其维修保障的主要做法及未来发展趋势,对于持续提升我军导弹武器系统维修保障水平具有重要参考价值。     

Aircraft weapon budgeting

This article considers the problem of allocating a fixed budget among alternative air-to-ground weapons. The weapon-budgeting problem is high-dimensional, involving all feasible combinations of aircraft, weapons, and targets. The decision maker's utility function is defined over kills of the various target types, but it is unrealistic to expect him to write down the mathematical formula for this function. The article suggests two procedures for reducing the dimension of the maximization problem and operating without exact knowledge of the utility function. The first procedure uses successive linear approximations to generate the set of “efficient” or undominated weapon allocations. The second procedure applies separability restrictions to the utility function, thereby reducing the overall maximization problem to a sequence of low-dimensional subproblems.     

Squad leaders today,village leaders tomorrow: Muslim auxiliaries and tactical politics in Algeria, 1956–1962

From 1956 to 1960, the French Army developed a force of Muslim auxiliaries (supplétifs) as a major component of its strategy to combat the National Liberation Front (FLN) insurgency in Algeria. Aside from their military utility in hunting down the guerrillas in the mountains and forests, the supplétifs were instrumental in undermining FLN legitimacy in the countryside. The rapid growth and employment of the supplétif force dismantled FLN political control in the villages, undermined the enemy's unity, and critically weakened the revolutionaries' claim to represent all of Algeria's Muslims. The military and political activities of France's Muslim soldiers also projected an image of Muslim–European unity behind the French cause, and portrayed the French Army as the only legitimate political force in numerous villages. These political successes, however, were limited to the local, tactical level of revolutionary warfare, and the Army was never able to convert the supplétifs into a force of decisive, strategic political significance. They thus had little ultimate impact on the outcome of the conflict.     

陆军自动检测设备发展综述

根据陆军武器装备系统对技术保障的要求,以及自动检测设备的应用和发展情况,论述了陆军自动检测设备的概念及分类方法,对陆军自动检测设备研制的技术设计思想和基本性能提出了具体的要求,分析了陆军自动检测设备的现状和发展方向,并提出了陆军自动检测设备的配置方案。     

TURKEY'S NUCLEAR COMEBACK

As worries have grown about global warming and the sustainability and price of fossil fuels, the demand for nuclear energy has increased, and nuclear power is increasingly viewed as a reliable and clean resource. However, the so-called nuclear renaissance coincides with an international security environment in which the norms of nuclear nonproliferation seem to be eroding. Turkey, a non-nuclear weapon state, plans to generate nuclear power to meet future energy demands, but it is aware of and concerned with regional proliferation trends. Questions have also been raised regarding Ankara's rationale for using nuclear energy, as well as its potential motivations and capabilities regarding future proliferation. This article will provide an overview of Turkey's nuclear energy history and plans, as well as the proliferation-related questions that could arise; it will also look at the domestic debate on nuclear energy and Turkey's status as a non-nuclear weapon state.