美军航天力量发展走势分析

美军一直奉行全球战略极度依赖天基信息支援。美军航天力量在夺取制天权,确保战时进入、利用太空自由,为海外军事行动提供信息支撑方面发挥决定性作用。美军认为航天领域颠覆性技术的应用将会迅速而深刻地颠覆传统战争规则,是应对新兴国家军事威胁,实施第三次"抵消战略"的核心技术。美军高度重视航天力量装备规划、体制编制、理论研究和人才培养的创新发展。研究近年来美军航天力量的建设发展重点,可以透过其一系列的航天力量发展规划,得出美军航天力量发展战略和走势,具有强的启示性。     

Capturing Contemporary Innovation: Studying IDF Innovation against Hamas and Hizballah

The question of what enables some militaries to innovate effectively is of great interest to both scholars and commanders. However, the traditional models of military innovation fail to capture the complex innovation process. This study develops a new analytical framework that examines the pressures on and incentives for military innovation in the international, civil/military, organizational, and cultural planes and uses it to evaluate Israel Defense Forces (IDF) innovation between 2000 and 2009. Based on interviews with Israeli commanders and extensive research in Israel, this work finds that the IDF struggled to innovate before the 2006 war against Hizballah, but innovated effectively after the conflict once military and civilian leaders understood threats similarly. New models are needed to analyze the contemporary multi-dimensional innovative process.     

Signaling and Military Provocation in Chinese National Security Strategy: A Closer Look at the Impeccable Incident

On 8 March 2009, five Chinese vessels shadowed and aggressively maneuvered in close proximity to the US Naval Ship (USNS) Impeccable. This paper seeks to explain the incident and its aftermath in the context of Chinese coercive diplomacy. China's strategy, designed to motivate the US to cease surveillance operations near its militarily sensitive areas in the South China Sea, included three components: (1) the use of military provocation, (2) a coordinated media campaign, and (3) a challenge to US interpretations of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS). This study goes beyond traditional research on Chinese use of force to explain why China's coercive diplomatic campaign took the form it did. Only by understanding the nature and factors affecting Chinese coercive diplomacy can the US design the effective counter strategy needed to protect US regional and global interests.     

The ‘War on Terrorism’: What Does it Mean to Win?

Abstract

The war on al-Qaeda and its affiliates appears to be endless but every war must end. Winding down the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq has been difficult, but both were embedded in what was then called the ‘war on terrorism.’ What does ‘success’ in that war mean? With the death of bin Laden and the increase in drone operations, how far is the US from achieving it? Can this war end? The article analyzes the ongoing US response to the 9/11 attacks in historical context, revealing four patterns common to all prolonged wars: means become ends, tactics become strategy, boundaries are blurred, and the search for a perfect peace replaces reality. It concludes by laying out an effective strategy for ending the war.     

Allies at War: British and US Army Command Culture in the Italian Campaign, 1943–1944

This article compares the philosophy and practice of command in the British and US Armies during the Italian Campaign of 1943–44. It assesses pre-war influences on the command approach adopted by each army, and shows how refinements derived from wartime experience enabled British and American commanders to successfully utilise mission command principles to outfight the German Army in the latter years of World War II. This examination directly challenges the historical consensus that Allied commanders were disadvantaged by an inability to exploit the advantages of mission command, and that the German Army retained superior command practices, despite its other failings, throughout the fighting between 1939 and 1945. These conclusions hold additional relevance to modern military organisations which have emphasised mission command as the optimal solution to effective command in battle since the 1980s, but from an inaccurate understanding of German, British and American command traditions and experience that persists to this day.     

Becoming the enemy: Convergence in the American and Al Qaeda ways of warfare

The United States and Al Qaeda represent two fundamentally different forms of warfare. The US, with its basis in the Western way of warfare, relies on an almost totally instrumental form of warfare and Al Qaeda, with its basis in the Islamic way of warfare, fights an expressive, existential form of warfare. This paper illustrates how both sides' ways of warfare are converging toward each other. It also argues that this is in fact a good thing because it will allow the US to understand its enemy and thereby allow the US to defeat him in terms he can understand.     

Analysing coalition warfare from an intra-alliance politics perspective: The Normandy Campaign 1944

This article sets forth a framework for analysis designed to enhance our understanding of the political management of coalition warfare. The framework, based upon literature appertaining to ‘intra-alliance politics’ and International Relations (IR) theories, is applied to the case study of the Normandy Campaign of 1944. Utilising this framework we are able to consider many of the thorny issues of coalition politics and determine how these can be managed successfully to maintain Allied cohesion. Throughout the analysis the merits of the ‘realist’ and ‘pluralist’ views on maintaining Allied cohesion are appraised. The article concludes that, while both afford convincing explanations for overcoming tensions within the coalition, the pluralist approach proves superior in accounting for Allied unity. Overall, the article demonstrates that the intra-alliance politics framework is a useful device for understanding the political dynamics of the Normandy Campaign in 1944 and that it is also potentially applicable to other instances of coalition warfare; past, present, and future.     

The strategic utility of New Zealand Special Forces

In 1955, the New Zealand government authorised the creation of a Special Forces unit to operate with British forces in Malaya to counter a communist-inspired guerrilla insurgency. Drawing upon the operational experiences of the New Zealand SAS largely taken from the Cold War period, and underpinned by Colin Gray's Special Forces essentials of ‘economy of force’ and ‘expansion of choice’, this article will show how New Zealand's SAS is now accepted not only as a respected and relevant part of the nation's military capability, but also empowers its political decision-makers with the confidence to take on significant, and at times difficult, strategic foreign-policy choices.     

The symbolic politics of ballistic missile defense: seeking the perfect defense in an imperfect world

Ballistic missile defense (BMD) politics present an interesting evolution in how the USA, especially Congress, has come to think about BMD both as operational reality and as a symbolic policy. The argument here is that BMD's operational reality is increasingly overshadowed by its symbolic aspects. Such a status arose from rapidly changing international and domestic politics. The end result is a situation in which BMD policy in a sense floats above the question of its actual combat effectiveness. Its primary mission in part is sustaining US capacity to remain a global power and support its allies.     

‘I have seen the future and it works’: The US defence industry transformation – lessons for the UK defence industrial base

The US has embarked upon a major transformation of its approach to defence industrial base planning. Although bureaucratic and industrial inertia, as well as budgetary constraints, may delay transformation, its effects will lead to radical changes in the US defence industrial base with new entrants and new combinations of players. The UK, with more modest defence ambitions, capabilities and budget, will seek to keep in touch with the US. However, a commercially‐led drive to embed UK industry even more deeply in the US defence market could be the last step in creating a largely US–UK North Atlantic relationship, with much of Europe very much a subsidiary business concern. This contains a risk that the UK will become increasingly dependent on the US for design and integration of major systems and national defence industrial capability focused on a limited number of niche technologies.