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.     

In the right place at the right time: US signals intelligence relations with Scandinavia,1945–1960

This paper demonstrates that US–Scandinavian intelligence relations in general, and Signals Intelligence (Sigint) relations in particular, during the period 1945 through 1960 were more extensive and complicated than had previously been believed. Bilateral US intelligence liaison relations with nominally neutral Sweden were of particular importance in the early years of the Cold War given its geographic location adjacent to the northwestern portion of the USSR. Moreover, the importance of Sigint received from the three principal Scandinavian countries covered by this paper (Norway, Denmark, and Sweden) proved to be quite important to the US intelligence community during the early years of the Cold War, when the US Sigint infrastructure was relatively weak and stretched thin by commitments in Asia and elsewhere. This paper covers the quantity, quality, and types of intelligence information provided to the US by each of the Scandinavian nations, demonstrating that the nature of US intelligence relations with these countries changed substantially as time went by.     

The Radford Bombshell: Anglo-Australian-US Relations,Nuclear Weapons and the Defence of South East Asia, 1954-57

This article looks at the emergence of nuclear planning assumptions within the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) during the mid-1950s. It does so by examining US strategic concepts for the defence of the treaty area, and the ways these produced major problems for the Australian Government as it switched the emphasis in its defence policy toward a permanent commitment of forces to the South East Asian mainland. At the same time, Britain was struggling to reconcile its membership of SEATO with the need to effect economies in defence spending that would not alarm their Australian Commonwealth partners. As dissatisfaction within SEATO grew, both the US and Britain moved toward a more overt acceptance of nuclear planning assumptions that would reassure their allies without producing a greater call on their resources.     

Influence without power? Reframing British concepts of military intervention after 10 years of counterinsurgency

British attitudes towards military intervention following the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have undergone what appears to be considerable change. Parliament has voted against the use of Britain's armed forces in Syria and the public are unenthused by overseas engagement. Conscious of the costs and the challenges posed by the use of British military power the government has been busy revamping the way it approaches crises overseas. The result is a set of policies that apparently heralds a new direction in foreign policy. This new direction is encapsulated in the Building Stability Overseas Strategy (BSOS) and the more recent International Defence Engagement Strategy (IDES). Both BSOS and IDES set out the basis for avoiding major deployments to overseas conflict and instead refocuses effort on defence diplomacy, working with and through overseas governments and partners, early warning, pre-conflict prevention and post-conflict reconstruction. Developing a number of themes that reach from across the Cold War to more contemporary discussions of British strategy, the goal of this special edition is to take into account a number of perspectives that place BSOS and IDES in their historical and strategic context. These papers suggest that using defence diplomacy is and will remain an extremely imprecise lever that needs to be carefully managed if it is to remain a democratically accountable tool of foreign policy.     

Syria and the perils of proxy warfare

The ongoing civil war in Syria is evolving into a ‘proxy war’, in which both the Baathist regime and its insurgent adversaries are becoming increasingly reliant upon support from external powers. Proxy warfare has a superficial appeal for sponsoring states, as it appears to offer a convenient and risk-free means of fulfilling foreign policy goals, which will not incur the financial and human costs of direct military intervention. Using Syria as a case study, this article shows that the conduct of proxy warfare has several potential political, strategic, and ethical consequences, which any democratic government in particular is obliged to consider before it resorts to this indirect means of foreign intervention.     

‘Faced with death,even a mouse bites’: Social and religious motivations behind terrorism in Chechnya

This article analyzes the motivations behind individuals who chose to adopt terrorist methods in the Chechen conflicts of the late 1990s and early 2000s. While the seemingly obvious motivation in joining in a ‘religious’ war of jihad would be a strong belief in that religion, the reality is more complicated. The motivations behind these individuals were not only religious, but cultural, social, and political. This indicates that while the methods and ideological rhetoric adopted by Chechen terrorists prove similar to methods adopted by terrorists across the world, the fundamental causes and drive behind these terrorists are actually quite distinct and unique from others.     

Aircraft weapon budgeting

This article considers the problem of allocating a fixed budget among alternative air-to-ground weapons. The weapon-budgeting problem is high-dimensional, involving all feasible combinations of aircraft, weapons, and targets. The decision maker's utility function is defined over kills of the various target types, but it is unrealistic to expect him to write down the mathematical formula for this function. The article suggests two procedures for reducing the dimension of the maximization problem and operating without exact knowledge of the utility function. The first procedure uses successive linear approximations to generate the set of “efficient” or undominated weapon allocations. The second procedure applies separability restrictions to the utility function, thereby reducing the overall maximization problem to a sequence of low-dimensional subproblems.