Military Spending and Growth: The Role of Institutions

Recent literature on whether military spending affects economic growth argues that the relationship may be a conditional one. We add to this literature by considering the role that ‘good institutions’ play in the effect of military spending on growth. Using data from a sample of over 100 countries from 1988 to 2010, our analysis suggests that the effect of military spending on growth is generally negative or zero at best, and this effect is mitigated in the presence of good economic and political institutions.     

Improvise,adapt and fail to overcome? Capacity building,culture and exogenous change in Sierra Leone

Military capacity building (MCB) is as problematic as it is ubiquitous, with the British experience in Sierra Leone providing a rare example of ostensible success. This article critiques the dominant conceptualisation of MCB as purely a principal–agent (PA) problem, using military change scholarship to examine the impact of wartime British intervention on the Sierra Leonean armed forces. Here, indigenous military change was both externally driven and fundamentally adaptive in nature, allowing MCB to bypass some of the difficulties predicted by PA models. However, this adaptive approach nonetheless failed to reconcile Western military values with prevailing Sierra Leonean culture, complicating post-war stabilisation efforts.     

抗日军政大学华中分校对青年马克思主义者的思想政治教育

抗战时期,新四军创办的抗日军政大学华中分校吸引了大批青年,通过马克思主义理论的学习和实践教学来开展思想政治教育工作。学校采取了灵活多样的思想政治教育形式,培养了大批军政干部,使青年学生提高了马克思主义理论水平,培养了艰苦朴素的作风,坚定了革命意志。其教学方法对当今的思想政治工作仍然具有现实的借鉴意义。     

How might Democratisation Affect Military Professionalism in Africa? Reviewing the Literature

The search continues for methods to improve security for development in Sub-Saharan Africa. One of the important actors in this security arena is Sub-Saharan African governments’ armies. Much of their capability to meet security challenge depends on how militarily professional they are. The wave of democratic evolution in Africa since 1990 also affected military professionalism. This article reviews three models for assessing how democratisation might affect military professionalism in Sub-Saharan Africa, with special attention to post-conflict states. This should make it possible to decide which analytical methods are most appropriate to measure military professionalism in the particular circumstances of Sub-Saharan African post-conflict democratisation. Depending upon the particular nation-state in question, this decision on analytical methods may be useful for other Sub-Saharan states as well.     

Measuring hard power: China’s economic growth and military capacity

China’s rapid economic growth is facilitating massive increases in its military spending and causing increased security concerns in Asia and the Western Pacific. But there is uncertainty over how large China’s military spending is relative to other countries, or how fast it is growing in real terms. We address this issue by deriving a relative military cost price index based on the relative unit costs of inputs. We find that China’s real military spending is much larger than suggested by exchange rate comparisons, and even larger than standard purchasing power parity comparisons. We also find, however, that the real growth of China’s military spending has been smaller than conventionally thought. This is due to rapidly growing wages in China and the large share of personnel in China’s military budget.     

Noncognitive skills and job match: evidence from military applicants

The study examines the effect of noncognitive skills on early career choices among young job seekers. Specifically, we analyze the influence of personality traits on the decision by military applicants either to choose the military or a civilian career option. We use a unique micro-level data-set of applicants to the US Navy and exploit the fact that many individuals who initially apply for military jobs eventually choose civilian careers instead. In this institutional setting, job candidates use new information to update their beliefs about the military job match. Personality traits are viewed as productive abilities that influence applicants’ expectations about the economic return to the job and occupational training offered by the Navy. The study finds that many of the 15 lower order personality facets associated with the Big Five traits are predictive of applicants’ job choices and provides suggestive evidence of a link between personality traits, job match expectations, and career choice.     

Threats and civil–military relations: explaining Singapore’s “trickle down” military innovation

This article explains why Singapore, despite its small size and semi-authoritarian regime, retains one of the best military forces in the Indo-Pacific. It unpacks Singapore’s ability to continuously innovate since the 1960s – technologically, organizationally, and conceptually – and even recently joined the Revolution in Military Affairs bandwagon. Drawing from the broader military innovation studies literature, this article argues evolutionary peacetime military innovation is more likely to occur in a state with a unified civil–military relation and whose military faces a high-level diverse set of threats. This argument explains how the civil–military fusion under the People’s Action Party-led government since Singapore’s founding moment has been providing coherent and consistent strategic guidance, political support, and financial capital, allowing the Singapore Armed Forces to continuously innovate in response to high levels and diversity of threats.     

人工智能赋能军事训练

随着大数据、物联网和5G的不断发展,海量数据的获取变得越来越容易,人工智能技术利用GPU的强大计算能力和深度学习网络对高维数据和非线性模型的拟合能力,迎来了飞跃式发展,深刻改变着人类生产、生活和学习方式,出现了语音识别、机器翻译、无人驾驶及智能机器人等场景,计算、数据与模型的不断发展也成为推动人工智能前进的主要动力.本...     

Mission Command in the Information Age: A Normal Accidents Perspective on Networked Military Operations

Theory on the use of information technology in military operations assumes that bringing together units in an information network helps units to work together. Decentralized command systems such as mission command have been proposed for these networks, so that units can adapt to changes in their turbulent working environments. Others have proposed centralized command systems that permit higher organizational levels to closely direct military operations. This article uses Perrow’s (1984, 1999) Normal Accidents Theory to propose that increasing interdependencies between units in information networks places incompatible demands on the design of networked military operations. It is concluded that networked military operations require decentralized command approaches, but only under the condition that interdependencies between modules of networked units are weak rather than tight. This precondition is essential for retaining control over networked military operations.     

War’s Horizon: Soldier-Led Adaptation in Iraq and Vietnam

Wartime adaptation is a process of adjustment from the war you planned for to the one you have. This process of adjustment is done, in part, by the practitioners of war in the theater of conflict–soldier-led adaptation. Drawing upon two case studies of gun truck development in Iraq and Vietnam I argue that soldiers created networks in order to adapt to battlefield challenges and that the pattern of those networks carries implications for the likelihood of formal adoption by the organization. Simply put, the pattern of the flow of ideas, resources, and skills across the battlefield may affect the likelihood of bottom-up adaptation.