孙子“慎战”思想对武警部队履行职能的启示

“慎战”是孙子军事思想中层次最高的战争决策思想,其理论主要包括不战思想、重战思想、善战思想和善后思想。在以和平与发展为主题的时代,孙子的“慎战”思想启示我们：要牢固树立“兵者,国之大事”的观念,加强部队现代化建设步伐,制定正确决策,“先为不可胜”;要以“非危不战”为原则,遏制犯罪,维护稳定,努力创造和平稳定的社会环境;要依据“胜于无形”,认真处理国内民族及其他矛盾,保持和谐稳定的社会环境。     

Property distribution and configurations of sovereign states: A rational economic model

A nation's wealth is both an object of conquest to covetous aggressors and a resource to its owners for self defense. To maintain autonomy every country must mount a defense which either makes its capture (1) more expensive than any aggressor can afford, or (2) more expensive than it is worth to aggressors. Whether this condition can be satisfied for all countries simultaneously depends as shown in this paper on relative efficacy of military offense versus defense, the aggregate of wealth among nations and its distribution, and the benefits a conqueror may obtain from conquest, including the duration of these benefits. The paper shows how these factors fit together to determine the sustainability and stability of the international distribution of property as embodied in the configuration of sovereign states.     

ECONOMIC GROWTH AND VIOLENT INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT: 1875–1999

This paper extends the joint product model of military alliances to apply to the new strategic doctrine adopted by NATO in the 1990s. In particular, a choice must be made between protecting one's own territory and pooling forces for an alliancewide rapid reaction force. This new model accounts for a host of externalities and their implications for burden sharing, full financing, and allocative efficiency. The Pigouvian taxes that adjust for force thinning and attack deflection are shown to finance optimal border‐protecting forces under a variety of circumstances. Second‐best considerations arise owing to the pure publicness of rapid reaction forces. The ideal toll arrangement does not currently characterize NATO financing, nor is it likely to do so.     

US technological collaboration for nonproliferation: key evidence from the Cold War

ABSTRACT

Although the existing international-relations scholarship argues that technological assistance in the nuclear domain increases the probability of nuclear proliferation, the historical account indicates otherwise. Congressional legislation for nonproliferation, economic sanctions, and poor state capacity—specifically, inept managerial capabilities of the recipient state—explain merely part of the puzzle, but overlook the role of positive inducements offered to impede nuclear proliferation. Historical evidence shows that the United States often provided technological assistance with the deliberate intent to inhibit proliferation. In other words, Washington employed its technological leverage to attain nonproliferation goals. American technological preponderance since the end of World War II made such an approach feasible. This study examines key Cold War cases—Israel/Egypt, India, and West Germany—where the United States offered technological assistance with the deliberate intent to stall nuclear proliferation, thereby underscoring the role of assistance for inhibitive ends.     

Deterrence in the Gulf War

A recently published collection of captured Iraqi records offers an opportunity to better understand Saddam Hussein's perception of US and Israeli deterrence signals, affording innovative insights into the reasons behind Iraq's restraint from using weapons of mass destruction against Israeli targets during the 1991 Gulf War. This article tests a wide range of suggested hypotheses, and suggests that US and Israeli deterrence played only a minimal role in dissuading Iraqi use of WMD. The article concludes with some thoughts on the practical implications, particularly on the effectiveness of a “no-first-use” nuclear policy.     

A theory of war finance

This paper analyses the financial and war‐spending policies of a state that faces a conflict in which defeat would result in the loss of sovereign power and in which the material consequences, conditional on avoiding defeat, are stochastic. The analysis takes explicit account of the historical experiences of lenders, who face debt repudiation if the state to whom they have lent is defeated and who also face partial default if the material consequences of the war are unfavorable for the debtor state, even if it avoids defeat. In this analysis, the state uses war debt to smooth expected consumption intertemporally in response to temporary war spending, and the state also uses contingent debt servicing to insure realized consumption against the risk associated with the material consequences of the war. An important innovation in the analysis is to treat the equilibrium amount of war spending, the state's resulting probability of avoiding defeat, as well as the equilibrium amount of borrowing as a set of endogenous variables to be determined simultaneously.     

LIVING WITH THE BEAR

George F. Kennan: An American Life, by John Lewis Gaddis. The Penguin Press, 2011. 784 pages, $40.     

How Probable is Cyber War? Bringing IR Theory Back In to the Cyber Conflict Debate

Many well-established explanations for war suggest that cyber weapons have a greater chance of being used offensively than other kinds of military technologies. This response article introduces a research agenda for the study of cyber war, and offers an example – principal-agent problems in cyber operations – to demonstrate how rigorous theoretical and empirical work may proceed.     

The British army,information management and the First World War revolution in military affairs

Information Management (IM) – the systematic ordering, processing and channelling of information within organisations – forms a critical component of modern military command and control systems. As a subject of scholarly enquiry, however, the history of military IM has been relatively poorly served. Employing new and under-utilised archival sources, this article takes the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of the First World War as its case study and assesses the extent to which its IM system contributed to the emergence of the modern battlefield in 1918. It argues that the demands of fighting a modern war resulted in a general, but not universal, improvement in the BEF’s IM techniques, which in turn laid the groundwork, albeit in embryonic form, for the IM systems of modern armies.     

‘What Kind of War is This?’

This article explores the nature of the American war in Vietnam in an effort to determine whether it was a response to an indigenous uprising or an external effort by the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) to use a wide array of policies and programs to unite North Vietnam and South Vietnam under the party’s leadership. It argues that, although there initially were elements of the South Vietnamese population that rose against the southern leadership, the CPV gained control of their resistance and relegated it to a secondary role in the CPV war effort.