Atomic intelligence in Norway during the Cold War

Thanks to its geographical location and close military ties to the US and Britain, Norway took substantial part in the Western intelligence effort against the Soviet nuclear weapons programme during the Cold War. Norway's relative proximity to the nuclear weapons test sites on Novaya Zemlya and the nuclear submarine bases on the Kola Peninsula was of particular importance in this regard. Whereas the tasks of surveying the development, deployment and possible employment of Soviet nuclear forces always had first priority, Western atomic intelligence conducted from Norwegian soil and waters was occasionally aimed even at gathering information about the geophysical and possible long-term medical and environmental implications of high-yield nuclear explosions in the atmosphere.     

Delusion of Defeat: The United States and Iraq, 1990–1998

This article challenges the widely held belief that that the United States ‘won the war but lost the peace’ following the war with Iraq in 1991. Fears of a resurgent Iraq grew throughout the decade, despite abundant evidence that Iraq was becoming desperately weak and was no longer a threat to regional security. In fact, the United States won the war as well as the peace by any meaningful definition of the term. The article also discusses the reasons why US policymakers and observers convinced themselves that they had lost. The final section considers implications for strategy and policy in wars of limited objectives.     

Sadat as Supreme Commander

Extant literature explains Egyptian successes and failures in the October 1973 War by Sadat’s restoration or abolition of ‘objective control’: when restoring ‘objective control’, Sadat succeeded; when abolishing it, he failed. However, Samuel Huntington’s theory cannot account for Sadat’s command performance, not because Sadat zigzagged between this theory’s extremes, but because he never thought or acted according to its recipe. I employ Eliot Cohen’s Supreme Command concepts to argue that Sadat’s command constituted an eccentric combination of military romanticism and politicization of war, whose paradox was reflected in the initial military successes and the achievement of Egypt’s strategic objectives despite the military failures by the war’s final stage.     

Reform,democratization, and counter-insurgency: evaluating the US experience in Cold War-era Latin America

Current debate on US counter-insurgency doctrine is dominated by the notion that promoting ‘legitimacy’ and ‘good governance’ constitutes a central strategic imperative. This idea is hardly new; during the Cold War US officials often sought to encourage democratization and socio-economic reform as antidotes to revolution in Latin America. This article reviews four such cases – Venezuela during the first half of the 1960s, Guatemala throughout the 1960s, Nicaragua during the late 1970s, and El Salvador during the 1980s. The purpose is to bring a historical perspective to bear on current debates about the feasibility of US counter-insurgency strategy by evaluating the effectiveness of previous campaigns to promote improved governance in developing societies wracked by guerrilla violence.     

从孙子兵法角度审视目标中心战的制胜机制

基于体系对抗的战争特点和我军作战实际情况,提出的目标中心战是现代作战思想的一次凝练及升华。它的制胜机制表现为三个层面：通过选择关键作战目标,提升体系对抗效能;通过影响目标系统功能,谋求局部对抗优势;通过融合体系要素,提高整体对抗能力。     

上海世博会警卫工作无线通信指挥平台的构建与应用

在众多安全保卫工作中,无线通信联络是确保警卫指挥有条不紊的重要环节。结合上海警卫部队特点及警卫工作实际。对世博安保警卫工作无线通信指挥平台的构建与应用,进行了回顾和总结。同时,也对警卫工作信息化建设进一步发展的具体思路,提出一些新的观点和理念。     

Escalation in Irregular War: Using Strategic Theory to Examine from First Principles

Abstract

If all violence is intended to achieve political effects, what is distinctive about escalation in irregular war? Indeed, what is irregular war? To answer such fundamental questions this analysis employs the principles of strategic theory in an attempt to offer a theoretical and practical framework that will facilitate an appreciation of the subsequent contributions to this special issue. The assessment seeks to articulate how the escalation process in conditions of so-called irregular war might be conceptualized and, via examples, illustrate how certain broad observations may be held to be true. Ultimately, though, the argument emphasizes that the process of escalation cannot be distinctive or follow predictable patterns given that all wars are unique to their time and place and will be affected in their conduct by the contingent forces of passion, chance and reason.     

Attrition models of the Ardennes campaign

This paper revisits the modeling by Bracken [3] of the Ardennes campaign of World War II using the Lanchester equations. It revises and extends that analysis in a number of ways: (1) It more accurately fits the model parameters using linear regression; (2) it considers the data from the entire campaign; and (3) it adds in air sortie data. In contrast to previous results, it concludes by showing that neither the Lanchester linear or Lanchester square laws fit the data. A new form of the Lanchester equations emerges with a physical interpretation. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 45: 1–22, 1998     

Factional politics in the Iran–Iraq war

This article examines the domestic causes of the Iran–Iraq War. It delves into secret discussions among Iranian political and military elites during the conflict, their analyses of their own performance on the battlefield, and their revealing public disputes and blame game decades later. It contends that an underexplored and yet critical driving force behind Iran’s prosecution of the war was factional politics. Along with state-level geo-strategic, regime-level security and individual-level ideological concerns, factional factors must also be examined to understand Tehran's war-time decisions. Iran’s factional rivalries began between the Islamists and the nationalists; and between the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the army at war’s outbreak, and eventually penetrated into the heart of the Islamist camp between the militant clerics and the IRGC.     

Self-Defense Militias,Death Squads,and State Outsourcing of Violence in India and Turkey

What explains the variation in states’ nonstate partners in civil warfare? States often use nonstate actors to do what their regular military forces cannot do well – navigate the local population. Some of their nonstate partners are ordinary civilians, while others are battle-hardened fighters with a rebellious or criminal past. The choice of proxy carries serious implications for the patterns and effects of violence during civil war, human rights, and international security. This article is the first to disaggregate the nonstate counterinsurgents and offer an explanation for why and how states use each type. It brings together the politics of collaboration with the politics of exploitation. The article shows that the state’s use of nonstate proxies is shaped by the supply of willing collaborators, the state’s ability to exercise control over them, and the trade-offs underlying the use of the different types of nonstate actors. The empirical evidence used to support this argument comes from a novel, comparative study of Turkey’s counterinsurgency campaign against Kurdish separatists and India’s counterinsurgency against Kashmiri separatists. The original data were collected through fieldwork in the disputed territories of each country.