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.     

Proliferation Optimism and Pessimism Revisited

Policies to counter the threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) have, for the most part, been modeled on strategies originally devised to counter the danger of nuclear proliferation. While useful in countering a traditional CBN (chemical/biological/nuclear)/WMD threat, current counter-proliferation and non-proliferation regimes are insufficient to meet the challenge of maritime terrorism. Maritime terrorism represents a new category of threat; one that partially overlaps with conventional WMD, but for which – due to the scope and nature of the maritime industry – traditional counter-proliferation policies may be inadequate and even inappropriate. This article outlines the means by which maritime shipping can be used as WMD and discusses the policies implemented to deal with these threats, in light of the challenges presented to traditional conceptualizations of WMD and counter-proliferation strategies.     

From the Editors

Israel's policy of military reprisals has never seemed to follow any consistent pattern of tit‐for‐tat. On the one hand, not every violent incident was answered with a counterattack. On the other hand, when Israel responded, frequently it employed an excessive amount of force, which was disproportional to the Arab provocation. This behavior has not been the consequence of a premeditated and rational strategy. Instead, it appears to have been the result of a political dispute between alternative approaches regarding the use of military force. The following research analyzes the development of this controversy and how these differences of opinion were resolved.     

How Probable is Cyber War? Bringing IR Theory Back In to the Cyber Conflict Debate

Many well-established explanations for war suggest that cyber weapons have a greater chance of being used offensively than other kinds of military technologies. This response article introduces a research agenda for the study of cyber war, and offers an example – principal-agent problems in cyber operations – to demonstrate how rigorous theoretical and empirical work may proceed.     

The Korean War: A 50‐year critical historiography

Scholarly research and publication in many countries has made the Korean War not only remembered, but also better understood. Material from Russia and China have been especially helpful in adding nuance and detail to now‐dated writing about the war's causes. Much more work needs to be done on Korean politics and the 1952–53 period, but in all the scholarship simply confirms the shared responsibility of all the belligerents ‐ including the Koreans ‐ in starting and continuing the war.     

One more push: Forcing the Dardanelles in March 1915

The historiography of the Gallipoli campaign suggests that the Turks were critically short of ammunition for the Dardanelles coastal defences in March 1915. This theme, established by Winston Churchill, became the basis for a widespread belief that the Royal Navy, after its failure to carry the Dardanelles on 18 March 1915, simply needed one more determined naval push to breakthrough the narrows. The presumed consequence was that the Ottoman Empire, with Constantinople under the guns of the Royal Navy, would have withdrawn from the war. Using modern Turkish sources, the author examines the available quantities, placement, and expenditure of ammunition, and challenges the premise that the Turks were desperately short of heavy shells. The author concludes that the Turks had sufficient remaining ammunition to fiercely contest control of the straits.     

The British army,information management and the First World War revolution in military affairs

Information Management (IM) – the systematic ordering, processing and channelling of information within organisations – forms a critical component of modern military command and control systems. As a subject of scholarly enquiry, however, the history of military IM has been relatively poorly served. Employing new and under-utilised archival sources, this article takes the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of the First World War as its case study and assesses the extent to which its IM system contributed to the emergence of the modern battlefield in 1918. It argues that the demands of fighting a modern war resulted in a general, but not universal, improvement in the BEF’s IM techniques, which in turn laid the groundwork, albeit in embryonic form, for the IM systems of modern armies.