Reinterpreting Libya's WMD Turnaround – Bridging the Carrot-Coercion Divide

The dominant explanations of Libya's nuclear reversal in 2003 privilege either coercion or carrots treating these instruments as alternatives. Indoing so they ignore that it took a combination of coercion, carrots and confidence-building to turn Libya around. This article demonstrates this by developing and deploying a theoretical framework that integrates these three instruments into a more coherent and convincing explanation of the case. It highlights that analysts and policy-makers would do well to focus more on how different policy tools can be used in combination to achieve desired outcomes than on how individual tools can be employed with decisive effects. It also demonstrates that the Libya success will be hard to replicate.     

‘A Better War?’ – The View from the Nixon White House

This article examines the relationship between the White House and the US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) during President Richard M. Nixon's administration. It argues that dysfunctional civil-military relations between 1969 and 1972 undermined the implementation of a sound military strategy during the United States' withdrawal from South Vietnam as Nixon attempted to achieve ‘peace with honor’ during the Vietnam War's final campaigns. By 1972, the relationship between the White House and MACV headquarters had reached the nadir of civil-military relations during the Southeast Asian conflict and had served to undercut the United States' ability to effectively disengage from a long and bitterly contested war.     

Encircled by enemies: Stalin's Perceptions of the capitalist world, 1918 – 1941

The article examines Stalin's intelligence on the capitalist world, including materials from military archives, diplomatic archives, and Stalin's private papers. It explores how these materials were collected, interpreted and shaped by Stalin's prejudices. It concludes that, from the end of the Civil War to the Nazi invasion, Stalin and the Soviet leadership believed that the Soviet Union was under a nearly constant threat of invasion from shifting coalitions of capitalist powers. No such threat existed until the late 1930s, but Stalin's perceptions have important implications for our understanding of Soviet foreign and domestic politics in the interwar period.     

The Israel Defense Forces as an epistemic authority: An intellectual challenge in the reality of the Israeli – Palestinian conflict

The changes in the nature of warfare and its transformation toward Low Intensity Conflict (LIC) intrastate conflict have challenged the patterns of interaction between the political and the military echelons in Israel. It seems that the political echelon's superiority is maintained at the institutional and formal levels, but on the substantive level, which demands relying on knowledge and systematic staff work, the political echelon's position is weakened and loses its validity.

Introducing the military echelon in Israel as an epistemic authority regarding the violent confrontation and the main outlines of the military knowledge development process might clarify why the absence of the required dialogue between the echelons and the weakness of the intellectual effort increased the military's influence over the shaping of Israeli conflict-management strategy. The argument's validity and its explanatory power can be found relevant for other countries whose militaries are deeply involved in the management of LIC.     

Close Encounters of the Tribal Kind: the Implementation of Co-option as a Tool for De-escalation of Conflict – The Case of the Netherlands in Afghanistan's Uruzgan Province

Abstract

In contemporary counter-insurgency campaigns de-escalation is typically achieved by obtaining the local population's collaboration. The rationale underlying this approach is that such collaboration spawns control over the population and therefore weakens the insurgent's position. This article seeks to understand how this approach is practised in the reality of contemporary counter-insurgency warfare. In Iraq as well as Afghanistan counter-insurgents were confronted with fragmented indigenous societies in which the various local segments were dominated by local power-holders. Consequently, obtaining the local population's collaboration required co-option of these agents. As such a strategy of co-option is a highly localized approach, this article focuses on Afghanistan's Uruzgan province and analyzes the implementation of co-option by the Netherlands' Task Force Uruzgan (TFU), which operated there from 2006 to 2010. The analysis discusses how the counter-insurgents obtained a profound understanding of Uruzgan's societal landscape and how co-option of local power-holders became part of the counter-insurgency routine. In the end, co-option was successfully implemented as TFU even succeeded in obtaining the collaboration of previously marginalized elements of the population. However, as the methods employed for co-option were mainly of a persuasive nature, the TFU co-option strategy was less effective in containing the influence of notorious spoilers. Thus this case study provides an insight into the dynamics and limitations of co-option as a tool for de-escalation in contemporary counter-insurgency warfare.     

The 1983 Nuclear Crisis – Lessons for Deterrence Theory and Practice

This article distills insights for the scholarship of deterrence by examining the 1983 nuclear crisis – the moment of maximum danger of the late Cold War. Important contributions notwithstanding, our understanding of this episode still has caveats, and a significant pool of theoretical lessons for strategic studies remain to be learned. Utilizing newly available sources, this article suggests an alternative interpretation of Soviet and US conduct. It argues that the then US deterrence strategy almost produced Soviet nuclear overreaction by nearly turning a NATO exercise into a prelude to a preventive Soviet attack. Building on historical findings, this article offers insights about a mechanism for deterrence effectiveness evaluation, recommends establishing a structure responsible for this endeavor, and introduces a new theoretical term to the strategic studies lexicon – a ‘culminating point of deterrence’.     

Iron Cannot Fight 1 – The Role of Technology in Current Russian Military Theory

Contemporary Russian military theory is dominated by three schools of thought: the ‘traditionalists’, the ‘modernists’ and the ‘revolutionaries’. On the role of technology in future warfare, the traditionalists argue for both high tech and massive forces at the same time. The modernists are ready to trade manpower for technology, whereas the revolutionaries give technology full priority. Both the traditionalists and the modernists believe Russia, because of the country's technological lag and limited resources, should respond asymmetrically to the Western technology challenge. The revolutionaries, on the other hand, maintain that Russia must respond in kind. If not, the country will no longer be able to defend its sovereignty. The currently ongoing radical reform of the Russian military is a partial victory for the modernists, but which model or mix of models that will dominate in the future is first of all dependent on the Russian military's purchasing power and the state of the domestic defence industry.     

Grammar but No Logic: Technique is Not Enough – A Response to Nagl and Burton

Abstract

In issue 33/1 of The Journal of Strategic Studies, John Nagl and Brian Burton were provided with the opportunity to respond to the observations we made in our article, ‘Whose Hearts and Whose Minds? The Curious Case of Global Counter-Insurgency’, which appeared in the same issue. Nagl and Burton's reply, however, did not overtly address the points raised in our article, but instead offered a re-statement of the precepts of classical counter-insurgency (COIN). While we certainly recognise the value of counter-insurgency methods in conflicts such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, Nagl and Burton's reply overlooks our original concerns about the limited utility of neo-counter-insurgency thinking outside these environments and the dangerous political implications it contains. They further ignore our core contention that a narrow preoccupation with theatre-specific technique has profound limitations when offered as a universal panacea to address complex transnational threats.     

Putin – the masked nemesis of the strategy of ambiguity

Recent events demonstrate the complex and adaptive approach employed by Russia to reassert influence in Europe. The changing face of Russia’s strategy commenced in 2007 when it launched a crippling cyber-attack against Estonia. This was followed by a large Russian conventional attack against Georgia in 2008, occupying two large areas of the nation. 2014 witnessed the Russian annexation of Crimea where in just a week, Russia seized control of Crimea “without firing a shot.” The annexation of Crimea was rapidly followed by a Russian inspired and led subversive war in eastern Ukraine. The common thread among these diverse Russian operations is its use of ambiguity to confound and confuse decision makers in the West.     

The right place at the right time,or the right person in the right place?

South Africa's military has, since the First World War, been an oft-used and effective tool in the conduct of South African foreign policy, but this role has not always translated into power for Defence Department principals in its formulation. South African Defence Ministers for most of the country's history have played a minor role in the making of foreign policy; despite a change in this dynamic between approximately 1975–1990, the post-apartheid era has once again seen a diminishment of Defence's power in this arena. This article examines why Defence Ministers have generally been such weak players, with an eye toward disaggregating whether this was a product of interpersonal relationships with Cabinet and – most importantly – the Head of State, or whether this influence (or lack thereof) was more a function of South Africa's international standing. While determining who has influence on this process is difficult given the primacy of the national leader in making foreign policy and a lack of insider accounts by participants in the process, this article relies upon several interviews with participants and knowledgeable observers that help illuminate the process and Defence's role in it.     

Identifying the spoilers in the security sector reform – disarmament demobilisation and reintegration process in the Congo

The Congolese security sector reform – disarmament demobilisation and reintegration (SSR-DDR) process has suffered from setbacks in its military sector during the last 10 years, such as insufficient funding, lack of coordination and domestic reluctance to major changes, with as a result, a very fragile and disjointed Army. These problems have deepened as officers have defected from the Army and caused new instability in the East of the Congo. This article aims to analyse the recent mutinies and the reaction by the Congolese government by applying a capabilities-based approach in combination with a typology of spoilers. The objective is to identify and classify the spoilers and answer the questions of why they emerge now and how they are dealt with on a national level. From the analysis, the author suggests that there are several spoilers involved in the current situation – the most powerful being the Congolese and the Rwandan governments, prompting the question of whether an international involvement is necessary to solve the problem.     

New Evidence on the Original Setup of the ‘Tilbury Group’, Formerly in the Tower of London

Abstract

An argument is presented that Valentine Green’s mezzotint engraving ‘Queen Elizabeth at the Head of her Army at Tilbury-Fort, A.D. 1588’ (1792) was inspired by the late 18th-century life-sized group of three figures representing the same subject that was formerly on show at the Tower of London. The mezzotint presented in Acta Historica Reginarum Angliae is the only known image of the original pre-1828 setup of the display, showing the figure of the queen in a skirt-like piece of armour that has since been re-identified as King Henry VIII’s tonlet armour.     

Communication: Wrap‐up on the cost of the gulf war

This paper discusses how crises and war may “disrupt” company activities, and how companies adapt to these disruptions. Croatia is used as a case study. The original hypothesis was that war led to breaks in physical flows: in other words, that companies experienced difficulties in importing and obtaining supplies of goods. Instead, it appears that loss of customers and severely worsened conditions of payment were the principal problems for Croatian companies. Although it does not fall within the scope of this investigation, it is interesting to note that the Croatian government has not imposed any direct rationing on the industrial sector, but rather via the banking system.     

Turkey’s imperial legacy and the conflict potential in the Balkans

Turkey is the only Eurasian state surrounded in almost a full circle by acute hot or “frozen conflicts,” ranging from low-intensity violence, terrorism to fully fledged wars. The prevailing pattern of intercommunal and interethnic conflicts in the continental Balkans and on Cyprus has long been different from those in the rest of Europe and in the Near East. This difference is closely related to the fact that these lands had experienced in the past centuries-long rule by the Ottoman Empire, whose legal successor is the Republic of Turkey. The intercommunal conflict potential in the rest of Europe used to differ substantially, but the difference has been greatly reduced as Western Europe has, in one respect, become “balkanized.”     

Army reconstruction in the Democratic Republic of the Congo 2003–2009

Since the peace agreements of 2002–2003 which ended the second war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, reconstruction of the army has been an inherently political process, in common with other attempts to carry out security sector reform (SSR). This article briefly sketches out the Congolese army's history, then attempts to fill a gap in the literature on Congolese SSR by detailing what can be found of the actual structure and shape of the present army. The efforts that have been made to reform the army are then examined, followed by a conclusion which examines the major issues and possible ways forward.