A Clash of Wills: Hizballah's Psychological Campaign Against Israel in South Lebanon

This article analyzes Hizballah's war against Israel in south Lebanon as a psychological contest where public opinion, perception, and persuasion were the real determinants of victory. Hizballah successfully mobilized popular support for its war by communicating nationalist and religious themes to different sectarian groups in Lebanon. At the same time, it used classic guerrilla warfare as a carefully calibrated psychological tool to erode the morale of Israeli forces, their Lebanese allies, and the Israeli public's support for the war. Hizballah's sophisticated media capability, particularly combat video footage aired on its satellite TV station and the Internet, played a critical role in amplifying the effects of its attrition campaign. By orchestrating information-age media and guerrilla tactics, this strategy has important implications for the future of irregular warfare.     

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.     

Can we negotiate with the Taliban?

The belief that the insurgency in southern Afghanistan is a singular entity and the assumption that negotiations with that entity can bring an end to the conflict are simplistic and do not take into account the other insurgent partners, nor the role of local power brokers. Care must be taken when providing advice in the public domain on how to end or limit conflict in Afghanistan.     

An American Trojan horse? Eisenhower,Latin America,and the development of us internal security policy 1954–1960

Perceptions of Third World nations as susceptible to communist subversion and revolutionary warfare led the Eisenhower administration to formulate a coordinated internal security strategy known simply as ‘1290d’. Later renamed the Overseas Internal Security Program (OISP), this policy initiative sought to strengthen host‐nation security forces, judicial systems, and public information media in an effort to combat indirect communist intervention strategies. Implementing OISP policy in Latin America proved difficult. In Congress, the administration was criticised for colluding with dictatorial regimes, while Latin Americans feared that the new program would be used as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to penetrate their security structures. After the Cuban Revolution, however, OISP policies developed under Eisenhower came to dominate US‐Latin American security relations for the remainder of the Cold War.     

DESIGNING A VIABLE PREDICTION MARKET TO FORECAST DEFENSE ACQUISITION COST AND SCHEDULE OUTCOMES

This paper is the first to demonstrate a viable prediction market that successfully forecasts defense acquisition cost and schedule outcomes, and to provide insights for defense executive decision‐making. Already used in private industry, prediction markets can also accurately forecast outcomes and their associated risks for government programs. Using virtual money, prediction markets allow traders to ‘bet’ on some future outcome. This market mechanism turns out to be a relatively simple and accurate way to discover, aggregate, and communicate to a defense executive the collective market’s beliefs about the likelihood of an eventual outcome of an acquisition program of interest.     

INTEGRATING NUCLEAR WEAPONS STOCKPILE MANAGEMENT AND NUCLEAR ARMS CONTROL OBJECTIVES TO ENABLE SIGNIFICANT STOCKPILE REDUCTIONS

In his 2009 Prague speech and the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, President Barack Obama committed the United States to take concrete steps toward nuclear disarmament while maintaining a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent. There is an inherent tension between these two goals that is best addressed through improved integration of nuclear weapons objectives with nuclear arms control objectives. This article reviews historical examples of the interaction between the two sets of objectives, develops a framework for analyzing opportunities for future integration, and suggests specific ideas that could benefit the nuclear weapons enterprise as it undergoes transformation and that could make the future enterprise compatible with a variety of arms control futures.     

The Problem of Weak Nuclear States

Governments are increasingly recognizing the problem posed by internally weak nuclear-capable states. The problem, however, is under-theorized. This article brings together literature on sovereignty and international order, the nonproliferation regime, and weak states, and introduces new concepts to provide a more structured understanding of this problem. Insight comes from focusing attention on the function and governance of two nuclear estates (termed the production and operational estates), and on their resilience to decay and disorder occurring within the state and society. Drawing on empirical observation, the authors suggest a typology of weakness in nuclear states, involving state fragmentation typified by the former Soviet Union, the “hard weak state” typified by North Korea, and the internally conflicted state typified by Pakistan. Although these types give rise to distinctive difficulties, their alleviation depends heavily on the maintenance of internal authority within the state and estates, the presence or absence of cooperative relations, and the international regulatory framework's vitality.     

Icons Off the Mark

In two landmark articles, longtime scholars Kenneth N. Waltz and Thomas C. Schelling have re-emphasized the utility of nuclear deterrence over nuclear nonproliferation (Waltz) and nuclear disarmament (Schelling). While the thrust of the articles is seemingly different, both are rooted in the same intellectual ground: an epistemology that assumes problem-free inferences, drawn from past experiences, are applicable in future scenarios; a foundational rooting in strategic rationality that entangles them in unsolvable contradictions concerning comparable risks of different nuclear constellations, namely deterrence versus proliferation and disarmament; and a bias in framing the empirical record that makes nuclear deterrence more conducive to security than nuclear disarmament. The common normative-practical denominator, then, is to let a nuclear weapon-free world appear both less desirable and less feasible than it might actually be.