The demand for military expenditure in authoritarian regimes

This paper examines whether there are systematic differences in military spending between different types of autocratic regimes. We view military expenditure as an instrument a dictator can exploit in order to stay in power. How he utilises this instrument depends on the institutional set-up of his regime. We distinguish between military regimes, single party states and personalist regimes, and predict that military regimes should have the highest, whereas personalist dictatorships should have the lowest level of military spending. Using panel data on 64 dictatorships from 1960 to 2000, we find empirical evidence that our hypotheses are not rejected.     

Mimetic and normative isomorphism in the establishment and maintenance of independent air forces

Why do countries have air forces? Organizational alternatives, such as maintaining separate air arms for the army and navy, have become quite rare. The conventional narrative advanced by advocates of independent air forces stress that the primacy of airpower in modern warfare mandates centralized control of most military aviation. In this view, political–military uncertainty has driven mimetic isomorphism – pressure on national governments to organize as others organize so as to fight or deter war just as effectively. However, working from a set of 56 countries that were politically independent within a few years of the establishment of the first ever independent air force (the Royal Air Force) in 1918, and continuing through nearly the present, there is no clear pattern of external military pressure prompting this particular reorganization. Rather, from anecdotal evidence, the cause has more likely been normative isomorphism – a professional craving to look as others look to foster political or personal legitimacy. For whatever reason, though, choices of structures tend to lead to specific choices of policies. Thus, the result suggests that defense ministries looking for more effective or less costly organizational schemas may reasonably consider alternatives to the tripartite army–navy–air force structure.     

以军事技术创新探索我军发展新模式

提出建立以军事技术创新为内在机制的新的军事发展模式,论述了这个发展模式的要点和特点以及为转向创新应注意解决的几个关键性问题.     

Thinking Globally and Acting Locally: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Modern Wars – A Reply to Jones and Smith

In light of present day calls for increased levels of cultural understanding on the part of Western forces engaged in conflict, this article assesses the utility of such knowledge in light of the British experience of the North-West Frontier of India 1901–1945. By using the British concept of the Political Officer as an example, it proposes that while cultural understanding is of genuine importance when operating in such a challenging environment, possession of it does not necessarily aid either the design or implementation of successful policy. As the British experience on the Frontier during this period illustrates, cultural awareness and understanding may be possessed in abundance, and the mechanisms for achieving such a state of understanding may be advanced, but traditional factors such as a cultural bias on the part of policy-makers, conservatism, underfunding, local resistance to unfamiliar concepts and a fractured civil-military relationship will dominate such awareness and overshadow the benefits that it may provide.     

Contracting Out Security

Private security companies (PSCs) currently receive a great deal of attention in the news media, in sensationalist reporting, and increasingly in scholarly books and articles. While the scholarly books and articles make significant contributions to our understanding of this global phenomenon, there are several impediments to analysis that must be recognized and overcome if analysis is to be improved. Three of these impediments are reviewed in this article. The author suggests that US government material is currently available to minimize impediments and offers a framework to make analytical sense of it. Since contracting out is based on contracts, and unless the complexities of awarding and managing contracts are understood, recommendations made to reform the process of contracting out security are unrealistic.     

China's Military Procurement and Its Operational Implications: A Response to Yoram Evron

This article is a response to Evron's argument, offering readers another perspective to assess China's military modernization and war fighting capabilities, using the same framework and methodology. It examines three topics: China's national security and military strategy, the PLA's procurement decision-making process, and China's military support and mobilization system. It concludes that, China's military modernization is to fight and win local wars under the conditions of informatization, but if required the PLA can reliably supply large numbers of sophisticated weapons and spare parts, to wage a complex and prolonged conflict.     

The Dutch COIN approach: three years in Uruzgan, 2006–2009

Rarely has a military commitment led to such intense discussion in the Netherlands as the Task Force Uruzgan (TFU) mission in Afghanistan. In February 2010, the Netherlands' coalition government even collapsed after the two largest parties failed to agree on the withdrawal of Dutch troops from Afghanistan later this year. This article deals first of all with the difficult discussion over the Afghanistan mission of the TFU. The authors then subject three ISAF operations to close scrutiny. The authors provide some suggestions to help understand better this pivotal point in the execution of the whole operation and thus give a fuller picture of the Dutch counterinsurgency approach in Uruzgan.     

Squad leaders today,village leaders tomorrow: Muslim auxiliaries and tactical politics in Algeria, 1956–1962

From 1956 to 1960, the French Army developed a force of Muslim auxiliaries (supplétifs) as a major component of its strategy to combat the National Liberation Front (FLN) insurgency in Algeria. Aside from their military utility in hunting down the guerrillas in the mountains and forests, the supplétifs were instrumental in undermining FLN legitimacy in the countryside. The rapid growth and employment of the supplétif force dismantled FLN political control in the villages, undermined the enemy's unity, and critically weakened the revolutionaries' claim to represent all of Algeria's Muslims. The military and political activities of France's Muslim soldiers also projected an image of Muslim–European unity behind the French cause, and portrayed the French Army as the only legitimate political force in numerous villages. These political successes, however, were limited to the local, tactical level of revolutionary warfare, and the Army was never able to convert the supplétifs into a force of decisive, strategic political significance. They thus had little ultimate impact on the outcome of the conflict.