Innovation for seapower: U.S. Navy strategy in an age of acceleration

ABSTRACT

A call for innovation as a means to outpace the acceleration of technological change and to bolster capabilities quickly is a central theme of contemporary U.S. Naval Strategy. The need for innovation is accepted, but the integration of readily available technologies into the Fleet is slow. Innovation unfolds according to “Navy-Time,” a cycle lasting between a long-decade and thirty-years. To accelerate the innovation process in the U.S. Navy, the article offers a Concept of Operations for Innovation that outlines how a deliberate process of analysis, weaponisation and integration can move new ideas and weapons into the Fleet in a strategically relevant time-frame.     

Anarchy’s anatomy: Two-tiered security systems and Libya’s civil wars

ABSTRACT

No issue deserves more scrutiny than the mechanisms whereby popular unrest unleashes civil wars. We argue that one institution – two-tiered security systems – is particularly pernicious in terms of the accompanying civil war risk. These systems’ defining characteristic is the juxtaposition of small communally stacked units that protect regimes from internal adversaries with larger regular armed forces that deter external opponents. These systems aggravate civil war risks because stacked security units lack the size to repress widespread dissent, but inhibit rapid regime change through coup d’état. Regular militaries, meanwhile, fracture when ordered to employ force against populations from which they were recruited.