IRA operational intelligence: the heartbeat of the war

This article will seek to provide a detailed examination of the IRA's operational intelligence methodologies. Providing not only a lengthy discussion on the organization's intelligence collection protocols, it will also examine the interplay between intelligence and IRA decision-making. It will be contended that intelligence's influence resided in its ability to introduce a strong element of predictability into the IRA's decision-making process. This depended on an ability to construct a detailed intelligence picture of the target and its geographical milieu so as to minimize the likelihood of volunteers encountering unforeseen circumstances that could adversely affect planned or anticipated outcomes.     

Introduction: Exploring the jungle of terminology

When twentieth-century authors wrote about ‘partisan warfare’, they usually meant an insurgency or asymmetric military operations conducted against a superior force by small bands of ideologically driven irregular fighters. By contrast, originally (i.e. before the French Revolution) ‘partisan’ in French, English, and German referred only to the leader of a detachment of special forces (party, partie, Parthey, détachement) which the major European powers used to conduct special operations alongside their regular forces. Such special operations were the classic definition of ‘small war’ (petite guerre) in the late seventeenth and in the eighteenth centuries. The Spanish word ‘la guerrilla’, meaning nothing other than ‘small war’, only acquired an association with rebellion with the Spanish War of Independence against Napoleon. Even after this, however, armies throughout the world have continued to employ special forces. In the late nineteenth century, their operations have still been referred to as prosecuting ‘la guerrilla’ or ‘small war’, which existed side by side with, and was often mixed with, ‘people's war’ or popular uprisings against hated regimes.     

The future of the defence firm: the case of the UK aerospace industry

The focus of this paper is the future of the defence firm within the context of the UK aerospace industry and its supply chain. The analysis considers aerospace markets and the aerospace industry in the UK before assessing the future of the defence/aerospace firm as a case study. The paper concludes that its future in terms of the strategic and important aerospace industry is uncertain. The corporate governance of the defence firm will have to change to reflect the hollowing‐out of the firm as the industry experiences significantly less vertical integration. The emphasis of the future defence/aerospace firm will be on ‘buy’ and not necessarily ‘make’. There will also be fewer independent defence aerospace firms as horizontal integration will occur across air, land and sea platforms as well as civil and defence aerospace firms. Indeed, conglomerate integration may even occur with cost pressures and market forces ensuring that merger activity goes beyond defence and aerospace into wider manufacturing industries and, in some cases, service industries in global markets.     

Militarism in post-war Cyprus: the development of the ideology of defence

This article provides a theorisation of militarism in post-war Cyprus. Based on qualitative empirical research conducted in Cyprus in 2011, the article explores the manifestation and steadfastness of Greek-Cypriot militarism, and the development of this militarism, which appeared after the partition of the island in 1974. In particular, it proposes the ideology of defence as a way to understand post-war Greek-Cypriot militarism. It shows the embedded nature of defence in the idea of the national struggle. It aims at mapping the character of this militarism in order to provide the grounds for future discussion. Only by understanding the interconnecting discourses that made Greek-Cypriot militarism possible in post-war Cyprus, can we understand its past, present, and future.     

Military intelligence and the problem of legitimacy: Opening the model

This brief essay looks at some of the emerging dilemmas facing the Intelligence Community (IC), and suggests a model for action that is based on the growing importance of legitimization now evident in all phases of US military activity abroad. The challenge for the IC is to satisfy the needs of a demanding and highly varied set of consumers while maintaining a clear priority on missions of military concern. When the legitimization priorities of broadly varied mission tasks are disaggregated and linked with the intelligence cycle, we see that total war, limited war, and operations other than war (OOTW) have distinct and incompatible priorities. Rather than try to adapt the existing system to fish‐out‐of‐water applications, and in the process degrade the capabilities of the IC to conduct total warfare support operations effectively, it may be time to envision a new, parallel intelligence agency for the support of limited war and OOTW.     

Key to the locks: Dating guns of the flintlock era

Abstract

This paper forms a study of side locks and in turn the accurate dating of the internal mechanisms of 18th-century flintlocks. The following study will also provide a clearer picture of the progress achieved by the generations of gunsmiths working in No. 10 (New) Bond Street, London, commencing with Samuel Harrison in 1718 through the famous name of Griffin to John Grierson in the 1840s.     

Note: Remarks on theory of the core

This note proposes a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of an undominated core and a necessary and sufficient condition for coincidence of the intersection core and the undominated core. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 47: 455–458, 2000