Counterinsurgency or irregular warfare? Historiography and the study of ‘small wars’

This article argues that the history of irregular warfare provides a valuable analytical and critical perspective for the study of counterinsurgency campaigns and counterinsurgency doctrine. A focus on the history of irregular warfare highlights the close relationship between warfare in Europe and in the colonies. Moreover, it enables us to identify more exactly the intersection of multiple factors that lead to an escalation of violence in small wars. Finally, it also sheds light on the lack of strategic reflection on the use of irregular auxiliaries that is characteristic for many counterinsurgency campaigns.     

The German wars of liberation 1807–1815: The restrained insurgency

In the Age of Napoleon, ‘small wars’ and ‘revolutionary war’ were closely connected. There were, however, different strands of this phenomenon: speaking professionally, conservative officers condemned small wars as an irregular regression to previous less disciplined forms of warfare. The Prussian state continually tried to discipline and regulate spontaneous risings. Yet the irregular character of small wars offered the opportunities for a less complex way of fighting, thus enabling the arming of the ‘people’ to fight. Individual undertakings, such as Ferdinand von Schill's doomed campaign in 1809, were designed to spark off a general popular uprising. But they were cheered by many and supported by few. Meanwhile, Neidhardt von Gneisenau conceived guerrilla-style Landsturm home-defence forces, which were designed for an irregular people's war. These concepts were put into practice in the ‘war of freedom’ – or ‘war of liberation’ – in 1813. Eventually both the mobilisation and the tactics remained regular, however, despite the emphatic appeal to a national ‘people's war’.     

基于混合智能算法的小型通信干扰装备分配优化

如何充分发挥小型通信干扰装备的作战效能是指挥员面临的棘手问题。本文将战术指标——干扰后的通信畅通区覆盖程度作为评估通信干扰装备分配优劣的指标,分别建立了单机和多部干扰时的通信干扰有效压制区和通信畅通区边界的计算模型,并给出了通信干扰有效压制区和通信畅通区面积的计算方法。构建了基于机会约束规划的空域频域通信干扰任务分配模型,并设计了混合蚁群算法和遗传算法的模型求解算法。最后进行了仿真实验,验证分析了模型和算法的合理性。研究成果为通信对抗战术计算和作战运用研究拓展了思路。     

《孙子兵法》“五德”思想对现代化武警警官素质修养的借鉴与启迪

古代《孙子兵法》要求为将之道必须具备“智”、“信”、“仁”、“勇”、“严”五德要素。新时期部队指挥员应当借鉴历史经验,努力提高自身素质修养,大力培育部队优良战斗作风,为履行新使命、新职责打下坚实基础。     

India’s Taliban Dilemma: To Contain or to Engage?

India’s Afghanistan policy in the 1990s is termed a zero-sum game of influence with Pakistan. New Delhi’s aversion to the pro-Pakistan Taliban regime is considered a marker of this rivalry. This paper revisits India’s approach towards Afghanistan and examines if New Delhi was necessarily averse to engaging with pro-Pakistan political factions during 1990s. Based on fresh primary interviews with former Indian policymakers, media archives, and official reports, the paper shows that India engaged with and accommodated pro-Pakistan factions after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 until 1996. The Taliban’s rise to power in Kabul in September 1996 challenged India’s engage-with-all approach. Nonetheless, the decision to sever ties with the Taliban and to bolster anti-Taliban factions was highly debated in New Delhi. Many in India saw the Taliban as a militant Islamist force sponsored by Pakistan. For others, however, it was an ethno-nationalist movement representing Pashtun interests, and not necessarily under Islamabad’s control.     

Shifting power,preventive logic,and the response of the target: Germany,Russia, and the First World War

If a declining state has incentives for preventive war, the rising state should have incentives to delay a confrontation until it is stronger. We develop the theoretical paradox and examine the July 1914 crisis. Why did Russia, rising relative to Germany, not adopt a buying-time strategy? We argue that although most Russian leaders hoped to avoid a confrontation, they feared that the failure to support Serbia would lead to a loss of Russian credibility and a significant setback to Russia’s position in the Balkans, one that could not easily be reversed, even with Russia’s expected increase in relative military power.     

Performances of the defense industrial base in France: the role of small and medium enterprises

This paper employs an economic and statistical approach to get an overview of the defense industrial base (DIB) in France. It allows us to identify its main characteristics and to measure the role of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). An original data-set was built, thanks to the information from the Ministry of Defense (MOD), the French Customs Central and National Administration, the Organization for Joint Armament Cooperation (OCCAR), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and all the most relevant organizations specialized in the development, production or maintenance, repair, and overhaul of military goods in France. Overall, the DIB turns out as being composed of about 1800 enterprises in France (subcontractors included), of which three-third are SMEs. Along with high market concentration ratios, these enterprises are characterized by a significant military/civil duality, high labor productivity rates, and intensity in Research and Development.     

Self-Defense Militias,Death Squads,and State Outsourcing of Violence in India and Turkey

What explains the variation in states’ nonstate partners in civil warfare? States often use nonstate actors to do what their regular military forces cannot do well – navigate the local population. Some of their nonstate partners are ordinary civilians, while others are battle-hardened fighters with a rebellious or criminal past. The choice of proxy carries serious implications for the patterns and effects of violence during civil war, human rights, and international security. This article is the first to disaggregate the nonstate counterinsurgents and offer an explanation for why and how states use each type. It brings together the politics of collaboration with the politics of exploitation. The article shows that the state’s use of nonstate proxies is shaped by the supply of willing collaborators, the state’s ability to exercise control over them, and the trade-offs underlying the use of the different types of nonstate actors. The empirical evidence used to support this argument comes from a novel, comparative study of Turkey’s counterinsurgency campaign against Kurdish separatists and India’s counterinsurgency against Kashmiri separatists. The original data were collected through fieldwork in the disputed territories of each country.     

Allies at arm’s length: Redefining Egyptian–Soviet relations in the 1967 Arab–Israeli war

This article examines Egyptian–Soviet relations in the run up to the 1967 Arab–Israeli war. It argues that Egypt and the Soviet Union stumbled into brinkmanship with little coordination and no agreement on common objectives or goals. The article demonstrates how frustration and mutual disappointment were recurring features of the interactions between the two allies during the critical weeks prior to the war. In doing so, the article exposes new aspects of how Cairo and Moscow managed their alliance and assesses what that means to our understanding of the origins of this transformative war. These conclusions challenge revisionist accounts that attribute the start of the war to Egyptian–Soviet collusion and some traditional narratives that present the Soviet Union as an enterprising risk-taker invested in regional brinkmanship. The article draws heavily on Egyptian and Arabic language sources to examine Egyptian–Soviet interactions during this key period of Middle Eastern history.     

Factional politics in the Iran–Iraq war

This article examines the domestic causes of the Iran–Iraq War. It delves into secret discussions among Iranian political and military elites during the conflict, their analyses of their own performance on the battlefield, and their revealing public disputes and blame game decades later. It contends that an underexplored and yet critical driving force behind Iran’s prosecution of the war was factional politics. Along with state-level geo-strategic, regime-level security and individual-level ideological concerns, factional factors must also be examined to understand Tehran's war-time decisions. Iran’s factional rivalries began between the Islamists and the nationalists; and between the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the army at war’s outbreak, and eventually penetrated into the heart of the Islamist camp between the militant clerics and the IRGC.