Decision costs in the intelligence cycle

John Terraine, The Smoke and the Fire: Myths and Anti‐Myths of War 1861–1945. London: Sidgwick &; Jackson, 1980. Pp. 240; £8.95.

Stephen Roskill, Admiral of the Fleet: Earl Beatty. London: Collins,1980. Pp. 430; £12.95.

Peter and Leni Gillman, ’Collar the Lot’. How Britain Interned and Expelled its Wartime Refugees. London: Quartet Books, 1980. Pp. 314; £8.95.

Frederic A. Bergerson, The Army Gels An Air Force: Tactics of Insurgent Bureaucratic Politics. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. Pp. xiii + 216; £8.50.

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Kenneth Mackenzie, Turkey under the Generals. London: Institute for the Study of Conflict, Conflict Studies. Number 126, January 1981. Pp. 31.     

The myth of Afghan electoral democracy: the irregularities of the 2014 presidential election

ABSTRACT

This article systematically assesses the 2014 Afghanistan Presidential Election, the first transfer of power from President Hamid Karzai to an elected successor, using provincial voting data as well as explicit data from polling centers. The analysis finds unusual voting results in the April election, where no candidate received 50%+1 votes required by the Afghan constitution, versus the voting results realized for the June ‘runoff election.’ As in other Afghan voting analyses, this article finds voting based on ethno-linguistic preferences, and interestingly found Dr. Ashraf Ghani receiving almost all the swing votes in the runoff election even though the other leading candidate from the April election all endorsed Dr. Abdullah Abdullah. More importantly, however, the research presented here clearly finds extremely strange voting patterns. For example, the polling data center analysis finds 606 polling places where Ghani received all 600 votes and Abdullah received none and another 900 polling centers that gave virtually all its votes to Ghani. These results in combination with other analyses raise the very real possibility that the election results were illegitimate. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the research to future Afghan elections and their processes as well as to the long-standing conflict in the country.     

Insurgency and Genocide: La Vendée

The struggle between the peasant population of the Vendee and the revolutionary government in Paris during the 1790s was perhaps the first, and certainly one of the earliest, of the modern ideological insurgencies. The conflict demonstrates the fatal weaknesses of a purely popular guerrilla movement deprived of sustained outside assistance. It also brings to the surface some less‐familiar aspects of the French Revolutionary regime. Most notably, that regime, determined to eradicate rather than conciliate the Vendean peasantry, employed methods that foreshadowed the techniques of National Socialism.     

Building A New Luftwaffe: The United States Air Force and Bundeswehr Planning for Rearmament, 1950–60

Rearming Germany was a long and complicated process. It was especially difficult to create a new German air force. The army generals who dominated the Bundeswehr cadre did not even want an air force but rather a small arm air corps. Moreover, Adenauer's defense staff failed to adequately budget or plan for a new air force. As rearmament began, US Air Force leaders, working closely with the small Luftwaffe staff in West Germany's shadow Defense Ministry, basically took charge of the process to ensure that the Germans built a new Luftwaffe on the American model – a large, multipurpose force organized as an independent service and fully integrated into NATO. The first Bundesluftwaffe commanders allied themselves to the Americans, often in opposition to their army comrades, to overcome the political problems caused by Adenauer's poor defense planning and create a modern air force on American lines.     

Russia and Strategic Conventional Weapons:

ABSTRACT

Russian political leaders and military strategists are growing increasingly concerned about “strategic conventional weapons”—a broad category that appears to include all non-nuclear, high-precision, standoff weapons—and about long-range, hypersonic weapons, in particular. These concerns are complex and multifaceted (and, in some cases, contradictory), but chief among them are the beliefs that strategic conventional weapons could prove decisive in a major conflict and that Russia is lagging behind in their development. US programs to develop and acquire such weapons—namely, the Conventional Prompt Global Strike program—are of great concern to Russian strategists, who argue both that the United States seeks such weapons for potential use against Russia—its nuclear forces, in particular—and because strategic conventional weapons are more “usable” than nuclear weapons. Asymmetric responses by Russia include increased reliance on tactical nuclear weapons, efforts to enhance the survivability of its nuclear forces, and investments in air and missile defenses. There is also strong—but not completely conclusive evidence—that Russia is responding symmetrically by attempting to develop a long-range, conventionally armed boost-glide weapon.