‘Getting COIN’ at the Tactical Level in Afghanistan: Reassessing Counter-Insurgency Adaptation in the British Army

This article reassesses the extent to which the British Army has been able to adapt to the counter-insurgency campaign in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. While adopting Farrell's definition of bottom-up military adaptation, this article contends that the task force/brigade level of analysis adopted by Farrell and Farrell and Gordon has led them to overstate the degree to which innovation arising from processes of bottom-up adaptation has actually ensued. Drawing on lower level tactical unit interviews and other data, this article demonstrates how units have been unable or unwilling to execute non-kinetic population-centric operations due to their lack of understanding of the principles of counter-insurgency warfare.     

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.     

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.     

Is South Africa's 20 years of democracy in crisis? Examining the impact of unrest incidents in local protests in the post-apartheid South Africa

This article assesses South Africa's 20 years of democracy, which has frequently been bedevilled by local protests. This article is particularly interested in those unrest incidents that have been distinct for one reason or another. In South Africa, the surge in local unrest incidents is often linked to police behaviour, which has become increasingly militant and brutal when quelling protests. While the right to protest is constitutional, the damage caused during protest action can be immense owing to acts of violence. Protestors' resorting to violent protest action is often linked to increased frustrations as a result of the government's inability to live up to the expectations of marginalised and poor communities. While this article draws primarily on existing scholarly debates focusing on social protests, the primary objective is to examine the impact of unrest incidents on local protests in post-apartheid South Africa. The article further argues that ‘spaces’ for participation in local governance should be created so that citizens can become architects of development and their own future.     

Multinational counterinsurgency: the Western intervention in the Boxer Rebellion 1900–1901

This article proposes a case study of the multinational counterinsurgency operations that occurred in China during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900–1, to provide a better understanding of the political and military dynamics specific to this type of mission. The study focuses primarily on the nature of the cooperation on the ground, the various national approaches to counterinsurgency, and the asymmetry of strategic approach between the Westerners and the Chinese. A discussion is also proposed, highlighting that combined counterinsurgency is not per se an obstacle to the unity of command, but that politically international coalitions create unique challenges to counterinsurgency operations.     

Ridge regression analysis of the defence‐growth tradeoff in the United States

An examination of past analyses suggests that today's sailors may be less responsive to compensation changes than previous generations. Such a change could make recruiting and retaining high‐quality sailors more difficult. However, variation in researchers' decisions over time may simply have created the appearance of such a change. Our results suggest there is little variation in the pay elasticity over time. In contrast, the different reduced‐form models we use to measure this relationship can explain most of the variation in the literature. Therefore, the evidence suggests that while sailors may have changed over time, their response to compensation has not.     

Surrogate warfare: the art of war in the 21st century?

Airpower, drones and cyber-weapons are employed by states in conjunction with local armed non-state actors in an effort to coercively intervene in the crises of the twenty-first century. While the externalization of the burden of warfare is a return to pre-modern war, it is the change in the underlying socio-political relations between the state and its military agent that is a novel phenomenon in surrogate warfare. This article demonstrates that in a post-Westphalian era characterized by non-state violence, globalized conflicts, a prioritization of risk management in a mediatized environment, the state has to explore new ways to remain relevant as the primary communal security provider. Thereby, the organization of violence has departed from the employment of the state’s soldier as the primary bearer of the burden of warfare to a mode of war where technological and human surrogates enable the state to manage the risks of post-modern conflict remotely. In this article, we conceptually explore surrogate warfare as a socio-political phenomenon within the context of globalized, privatized, securitized and mediatized war.     

Military Innovation and Tactical Adaptation in the Israel–Hizballah Conflict: The Institutionalization of Lesson-Learning in the IDF

This article highlights a pattern of military adaptation and tactical problem-solving utilized by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) while engaged in protracted conflict with the Lebanese militant group Hizballah. It discusses the IDF’s recent attempts to institutionalize their historically intuitive process of ad-hoc learning by developing a formal tactical-level mechanism for ‘knowledge management’. The diffusion of this battlefield lesson-learning system that originated at lower-levels of the organization is examined, as well as its implementation and effectiveness during the 2006 Lebanon War. A nuanced analysis of IDF adaptation illustrates the dynamic interplay between both ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ processes of military innovation.     

How they joined? Militants and informers in the armed conflict in Donbas

ABSTRACT

The effectiveness of recruitment strategies is crucial for sustainability of any insurgent campaign. This paper identifies eight mechanisms used to encourage overt and covert participation in the armed conflict in Donbas and shows that they varied depending on the type of service expected from a recruit. It relies on the original dataset compiled from studying 798 court cases of insurgents and informers convicted in Ukrainian courts in the period from October 2014 to March 2017. The paper finds that militants were more responsive to contractual or hierarchical mechanisms of recruitment, while informers who provided cover support were more likely to join through ideological appeals or activation of prior social ties.     

‘A Time of War’: contextual and organisational dimensions in the construction of combat motivation in the IDF

This paper explores the construction of combat motivation in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), arguing that although Israeli society at large is in a ‘Post Heroic’ era, the ‘Heroic Spirit’ is revealed during emergencies. A total of 1535 questionnaires were administered among combat soldiers during large-scale operations fought during national emergency and during small-scale routine operations. The results reveal differences in the construction of combat motivation typical for emergency vs. routine, as well as for reserves vs. regular units. These results indicate that the Post Heroic era is a condition that could be shifted according to cultural, organisational and individual determinants. This paper discusses the roots of these constructions and their implications on the theory of combat motivation and combat experience.     

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.     

Politics in the shadow of the gun: revisiting the literature on ‘Rebel-to-Party Transformations’ through the case of Burundi

Abstract

This article provides a critical review of ‘rebel-to-party transformation’ scholarship. It shows how three flawed assumptions have underpinned much of the literature: (1) an ideal-typical differentiation between rebel group and political party as distinct by their use or rejection of violence; (2) the analysis of armed conflict as breakdown of ‘normal’ politics, and the study of ‘rebel-to-party conversions’ as a gradual, natural shift from violence back to politics; (3) a failure to integrate the study of rebel legacies into an examination of broader authoritarian legacies. These assumptions have clouded our understanding of politico-military organizations in conflict-torn societies, which combine social protest, armed rebellion, political violence, and party politics throughout their history. Drawing on the ‘no peace, no war’ and ‘armed politics’ paradigms, this article revisits these assumptions through the case of Burundi.     

Evaluating the trade‐off between military spending and investment in the United States

Using tests of a single equation model and cointegration techniques, this paper finds no evidence of a long run trade‐off, and some evidence of a short‐run trade‐off, between military spending and investment in post‐World War II United States data. The short‐run trade‐off is confined to the 1949–1971 period, and may be the result of the sharp expansion and contraction of military outlays in connection with the Korean and Vietnam Wars. In addition, cointegration techniques are used to identify a possible long‐run trade‐off between military spending and consumption.     

Conceptualizing the War in Afghanistan: Perceptions from the Front, 2001–2006

Analytical focus on military operations in Iraq continue to overshadow analysis of the war in Afghanistan as it enters its sixth year. It is now possible to discern several clearly-delineated periods of coalition counterinsurgency and stabilization operations. What is the nature of the war and how has it evolved? Has there been success so far in Afghanistan?