Arming China: Major powers’ arms transfers to the People’s Republic of China

The rise of China has been fuelled by a massive military modernisation programme relying, in large part, on the acquisition of foreign military equipment. The question of how the world’s major powers define their arms transfer policies towards China is therefore crucially important. This article makes two original contributions. First, drawing on neoclassical realism, it proposes an explanatory framework integrating international and domestic factors to explain variations in major powers’ arms transfers. Second, based on a large body of elite interviews and diplomatic cables, it offers the first comprehensive comparison of American, British, French and Russian arms transfer policies towards China since the end of the Cold War.     

关于军民融合大交通体系建设的几点思考

党的十九大报告把军民融合发展战略作为七大国家战略之一,明确提出要"更加注重军民融合"。必须将交通领域军民融合视作整个军民融合深度发展的重要突破口,建设军民融合大交通体系。提出以新形势下军事战略方针为统揽,以军民深度融合为途径,聚焦保障军队打赢,大力推进民用交通设施工具贯彻要求;依托国家路网基础,大力推进军地交通运输网络统筹纳入;强化应战应急一体,大力推进各种交通力量建设互补衔接;着眼战略投送能力,大力推进军民交通物流体系有机结合。     

Think again – supplying war: reappraising military logistics and its centrality to strategy and war

This article argues that logistics constrains strategic opportunity while itself being heavily circumscribed by strategic and operational planning. With the academic literature all but ignoring the centrality of logistics to strategy and war, this article argues for a reappraisal of the critical role of military logistics, and posits that the study and conduct of war and strategy are incomplete at best or false at worst when they ignore this crucial component of the art of war. The article conceptualises the logistics–strategy nexus in a novel way, explores its contemporary manifestation in an age of uncertainty, and applies it to a detailed case study of UK operations in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.     

增材制造技术在军事物流中的应用研究

增材制造技术是一种新型的制造技术,现已被应用到了航空航天、汽车工业和军事等诸多行业领域.作为军事领域的重要组成部分,军事物流与增材制造技术通过军用物资这一共同的作用对象为纽带存在着天然的联系.遗憾的是,目前增材制造技术在军事领域的应用范围还比较局限,有关军事物流的应用更是少见.为有效推动增材制造技术在军事物流中的应用实...     

狭义的坦克远程火力军事需求分析

坦克作为一种近距离格斗兵器来使用的科学性、合理性勿庸质疑,传统的使用方式却导致发展坦克的远程火力成为一个备受争议的话题.立足于信息化作战的背景及我军的现实,着眼于陆军武器系统未来发展的趋势,分析了未来陆军可能的作战模式及其火力体系,从军事、经济、技术的角度分析了我军装甲机械化部队发展坦克远程火力的必要性,并在此基础上分析了坦克远程火力的作用距离、使用的原则与使用的时机,最后对武器装备的"非对称"发展模式提出了初步的看法.     

论军事建筑的审美倾向

随着社会的进步和文明程度的提高,军营文化与部队精神文明不断向前发展,其中,军事建筑的审美标准和文化特质有了新的内涵。从建筑美学的角度探讨了当前军事建筑的审美倾向,并通过实例分析提出了军事建筑的创作与批评应当坚持“以人为本”的原则,对当前部队营区营房的建设具有一定的指导意义。     

军事联盟的形成机制与对策

国家间的对抗与合作是国际关系中的最常见的问题,通过引入博弈论中的讨价还价模型和差分方程,分析了联盟的形成机制,并对三国合作、三国竞争以及三国部分合作对抗的情况进行了比较,通过数值仿真对模型分析过程进行了验证,仿真结果表明,不同类型国家的策略选择对博弈结果影响很大,研究内容较好地揭示了国家间矛盾与利益的变化规律,为深入理解国际关系提供了参考。     

“Respect” as a personal attribute in the British Army

This article describes the results of research into the social phenomenon of “respect” as framed by junior members of the British Army, as part of a wider study into the Values and Standards of the British Army. This research was interview based, using qualitative analysis software to detect, manage, and draw conclusions from the qualitative data recorded in those interviews. The data indicated that the primary situation in which “respect” was visualised by the participants was the unit context, and that it comprised a combination of three different strands: respect for rank or “hierarchical respect,” “professional respect” for a person's military competence, and “personal respect” for an individual's character, personal behaviour, and attributes. The overall respect that an individual is given arises from the combination of these three areas. “Respect” as a concept was, in the soldiers’ characterisation, something that had to be earned (except for the “given” represented by rank) and was not stable: a person's fund of respect could go up or down in social value. Respect was also linked to trust: the more respect a person had, the more they could be trusted. Although the unit context was the primary one for discussing their framing of the concept of respect, many of the participants reported a wider dimension in which every human being deserves a basic level of respect simply for being human, and this level could not be forfeited.     

Is strategic studies narrow? Critical security and the misunderstood scope of strategy

Critical security advocates commonly portray strategic studies as crippled by its narrow focus on Cold War-era military issues, as state-centric and as Western-centric. I argue that this conception of the scope of strategy is flawed and I offer a comprehensive rebuttal by working out the logic of the theories advanced by Carl von Clausewitz and Thomas Schelling. The proponents of critical security overlook the striking expansion of strategy during the Cold War, its longstanding inclusion of competing political actors not just states, as well as its capacity to put Western and non-Western actors in a common analytic frame. By breaking out of the conceptual jails in which strategy has been incarcerated, I seek to reconnect International Relations to strategic thought from which it has become increasingly estranged.