Identifying the challenges to defence reform in Central and Eastern Europe: observations from the field

The authors have over 50 years' experience of working on defence in Central and Eastern Europe. They have been intimately involved in trying to reform over 10 national defence organisations including Ukraine. During this work, they often faced intractable resistance and scepticism or conversely, apparent unbounded support, but following this, a complete lack of any actual implementation work by officials. This paper addresses some of the findings and observations identified by the authors that appear to cause these responses and the consequent failure of reform. A new research approach has been taken by using the business and culture tools from Schein, Hofstede and Kotter to try and unravel the underlying causality of that failure. The second part of the paper produces a new process for change based upon the research conclusions to help other advisers and consultants working on reform in the post communist defence arena.     

Home Defence and the Sandys Defence White Paper, 1957

Long understood as the key document in Britain's Cold War history, the Duncan Sandys Defence White Paper of 1957 nevertheless has a largely forgotten context: home defence. This article argues that understanding this context allows important new conclusions to be drawn concerning the drafting, presentation and the reception of the document and the deterrent strategy it expounded. It argues that the Paper failed to establish a new doctrine for civil defence which reconciled the policy with the wider deterrent strategy. In doing this, the Paper presented a muddled policy to the public: one which failed to justify the reductions in civil defence provision but which stressed the destructive power of thermonuclear weapons. This had the effect of encouraging the critics of the government's nuclear strategy to flag up the absence of adequate civil defence measures and highlight the ‘admission’ that there was no defence against the hydrogen bomb.     

Holmes’ front: constructing a new face of battle for America’s Civil War

ABSTRACT

In his seminal study of the changing nature of warfare between Agincourt and the Somme, military historian John Keegan proposed that future historians might consider combatants’ emotions in their assessments of the impact and nature of conflict. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of the history of emotions as an analytical approach, but rarely, if ever, is this directed toward the study of military history, far less the history of insurgencies and counter-insurgencies. This paper examines America’s civil war (1861–1865) as a case study of the ways in which an emotional history approach might illuminate not the physical experiences of but rather the immediate and longer-term reactions to counter-insurgency conflict through a focus on one specific individual, the future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. It proposes that Holmes, whilst not a man of the ranks, nevertheless can reveal the wider ramifications of civil war and its emotional impact, both individually and culturally. As a relatively limited internecine war, one not fought by professional armies but by volunteer forces, America’s civil war highlights the ways in which the soldier’s response points us toward the kind of emotional revolution that has, to date, mainly been located within the European nations.