Staying Power and the American Future: Problems of Primacy,Policy, and Grand Strategy

Many scholars, strategists and pundits contend that the US is in decline. They argue that America's national capabilities are significantly eroding, and that with the rise of important regional powers, its primacy in world affairs is rapidly diminishing as well. Yet America continues to possess significant advantages in critical sectors such as economic size, technology, competitiveness, demography, force size, power projection, military technology, and in the societal capacity to innovate and adapt. This article argues that the nature of material problems has been overstated, and that the US should be able to withstand modest erosion in its relative strength for some time to come without losing its predominant status. Instead, where limits to American primacy do exist, they are as or more likely to be ideational as they are material. The problem inheres as much or more in elite and societal beliefs, policy choices, and political will, as in economic, technological or manpower limitations at home, or the rise of peer competitors abroad.     

The US–India courtship: from Clinton to Bush

While a considerable thaw in Indo–US relations bequeathed by the Cold War took place under Clinton, there are still factors, even after 11 September 2001, which have hindered a relationship with common strategic interests. These factors involve divergences on nuclear proliferation, the emergence of China as a world power, the pace of India's economic liberalisation, and Indo–Pakistan tension. A strategic partnership is achievable, but India will need to keep US interests constantly in focus.     

Reconstruction,the Long Tail and Decentralisation: An Application to Iraq and Afghanistan

In this paper, we examine the current state of knowledge in the economics literature on the conduct of reconstruction activities in Iraq and Afghanistan. As stabilisation and reconstruction missions grow in importance for units deployed to these regions, it becomes more important to understand what activities can promote economic growth at the local level. While military operations focus on interdicting the insurgency, successful counter-insurgency campaigns have typically addressed the conditions conducive to the insurgency. Mitigating the incentives for individuals to participate in an insurgency is imperative. Well-crafted and timed reconstruction activities can, we argue, attenuate these incentives.     

Yugoslavia: The Final Showdown

After a half century of inaction, NATO intervened in Yugoslavia on behalf of Kosovar Albanians. Methodologically speaking, the action represents a new way of making war in the wake of the Cold War's conclusion. A dramatic increase in the politicisation of warfare, which has manifested itself through political campaigns to sell war to the people, is visible in how the US and key NATO allies justified action in 1999. The campaign to sell the war brought together both emotional appeals to alleviate humanitarian suffering and realist dilemmas aimed at preventing wider conflict. Learning from history, I argue that the war against Yugoslavia unfolded as it did because of the political events of the 1990s and, that by understanding that series of events, we can better predict what future conflicts might look like.     

Unrestricted warfare: Review essay I

During the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970), France chose to support Biafra, but only on a limited scale, providing mercenaries and obsolete weaponry to Ojukwu's regime. General Charles de Gaulle's assistance to Ojukwu was conditioned by the French military drawdown after 1961, the increased power of French secret services on the continent, and the interventions in Katanga (1960–1963), Gabon (1964) and Chad (1968–1972). France supported Biafra primarily to protect its former colonies from Nigeria, stop Soviet subversion and acquire an economic foothold in the oil-rich Niger Delta. De Gaulle chose a limited strategy for two reasons. If Biafra won the war, France would be Biafra's greatest ally. If Nigeria won the war, France could extricate itself from the situation relatively easily and re-establish relations with the Nigerian government, which is what ultimately occurred.     

Feeding Bread to the Luddites: The Radical Fundamentalist Islamic Revolution in Guerrilla Warfare

This study examines the war that the United States has waged since September 2001 as a global counterinsurgency. Placing the war against al-Qaeda and its allied groups and organizations in the context of a global insurgency also presents implications for doctrine, interagency coordination and military cultural change. The first part of the article offers a distilled analysis of al-Qaeda and its associated networks. The second section examines the US military in the context of the Western way of war, with the attendant military-cultural impediments to adapting to an enemy who embraces a very different approach to war. The third section aims to define and describe the nature of the war that America and its coalition partners are trying to wage. The concluding section offers the most value as it refines and distills the work of several international security and military thinkers to arrive at some imperatives for successfully prosecuting this type of war to its end.     

Schlock and Blah: Counter-insurgency Realities in a Rapid Dominance Era

This article examines the concept of ‘shock and awe’ in US military thought. It argues that the term derives from two main sources in defense thinking: rapidity in operations and overwhelming military superiority and is reflected in the concept of ‘full spectrum dominance’. However, the concept is not well attuned to fighting net-based counter insurgency war in a terrain such as Iraq which depends upon both intelligence gathering and adaptive military organizations. The article concludes that US military thinking should be more attuned to the effects of military force especially on political processes and the capacity of insurgents to mobilize popular support.     

Responding to the failed state: The need for strategy

Given the challenges posed by failed and failing states, and the likelihood that such failure will continue well into the new millennium, the need for a strategic approach appears evident. Should we respond? If so, how and with what expectations? Answers to such questions require an underlying set of strategic guidelines. This article contributes to developing that strategy by examining common manifestations of state failure and some possible response objectives. It concludes by arguing that careful and tough analysis must guide our choices about where and when to respond, and how ambitiously we set our objectives.     

Bounding methods for facilities location algorithms

Single- and multi-facility location problems are often solved with iterative computational procedures. Although these procedures have proven to converage, in practice it is desirable to be able to compute a lower bound on the objective function at each iteration. This enables the user to stop the iterative process when the objective function is within a prespecified tolerance of the optimum value. In this article we generalize a new bounding method to include multi-facility problems with l_p distances. A proof is given that for Euclidean distance problems the new bounding procedure is superior to two other known methods. Numerical results are given for the three methods.