India's counter-insurgency experience: the ‘trust and nurture’ strategy

The Indian Army, a force trained primarily for conventional warfare, has been engaged in internal counter-insurgency operations since the 1950s. Despite such a long innings on a counter-insurgency mode, little attention has been accorded within military circles to doctrinal innovation for waging sub-conventional warfare in India's democratic political context. At best, the Army continues to view counter-insurgency duty as secondary to its primary duty of defending India from external conventional threats. By conceptualizing a counter-insurgency strategy of ‘trust and nurture’, this article aims to fill this critical doctrinal gap in India's military policy. The author argues that a counter-insurgency strategy of ‘trust and nurture’ based on democratic political culture, measured military methods, special counter-insurgency forces, local social and cultural awareness and an integrative nation-building approach will result in positive handling of India's internal security problems. The author utilizes India's counter-insurgency experiences in Assam, Mizoram, Nagaland, Punjab, and Operation ‘Sadhbhavana’ in Jammu and Kashmir as illustrative empirical indicants in order to validate the ‘trust and nurture’ strategy.     

基于标签树的生长干部招生计划聚类方法

生长干部招生计划是规定军队干部补充来源渠道及数量规模的重要依据,对干部队伍建设与发展具有重要的意义。随着招生计划每年拟制与积累,分析与评估计划将会起到辅助决策的作用,对招生工作的实施带来深远影响。本文从数据挖掘的角度,以聚类的方法研究分析招生计划,这为分析历年计划的波动性并理解评价计划与政策的贴合度提供了定量分析的手段。首先分析了招生计划的特点,进而提出以标签树量化招生计划的解决思路,通过抽取标签树中的特征子树作为聚类中的度量特征,并采用共现的方法实施"先形成核心,再依次分类"的步骤完成聚类。实验表明该方法在合成数据集和真实数据集上聚类效果较好、效率较高,对分析招生计划具有一定理论意义。     

结构解析建模方法在舰艇训练计划中的应用

根据舰艇训练计划特点,运用结构解析模型分析舰艇训练计划,建立训练内容的邻接矩阵与可达矩阵,划分训练内容的层次,并进行分层优化排列配置.建立的结构解析模型在计划实施过程中可根据外部因素的变化,提出适应不同变化的计划方案,能很好适用于实际的训练环境,大大提高了时间、资源利用率和保障舰艇的训练安全,对现有舰艇训练方法起到很好的改进作用.     

Unrestricted warfare: Review essay I

During the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970), France chose to support Biafra, but only on a limited scale, providing mercenaries and obsolete weaponry to Ojukwu's regime. General Charles de Gaulle's assistance to Ojukwu was conditioned by the French military drawdown after 1961, the increased power of French secret services on the continent, and the interventions in Katanga (1960–1963), Gabon (1964) and Chad (1968–1972). France supported Biafra primarily to protect its former colonies from Nigeria, stop Soviet subversion and acquire an economic foothold in the oil-rich Niger Delta. De Gaulle chose a limited strategy for two reasons. If Biafra won the war, France would be Biafra's greatest ally. If Nigeria won the war, France could extricate itself from the situation relatively easily and re-establish relations with the Nigerian government, which is what ultimately occurred.     

Institutionalizing supreme command: explaining political–military integration in the Vietnam War, 1964–1968

Under what conditions can leaders achieve wartime political–military integration? In the Vietnam War, political–military integration exhibited dramatic variation: in the air war, the US was able to tightly integrate its political objectives and military conduct, but in the ground war, the American military prosecuted a strategy that was both divorced from broader political objectives and was immune from Washington's influence. I argue that the nature of information management between the military and civilian leadership explains the pattern of political–military integration in the Vietnam War more completely than do explanations that focus on the organizational cultures of professional militaries.     

Boko Haram’s increasingly sophisticated military threat

ABSTRACT

This paper evaluates Boko Haram’s military capabilities and details the process of how its standing army, driven by these capabilities, came to pose a phased threat between 2013 and 2015 in particular. This was a period when military fighting dominated the insurgency in north-east Nigeria. Whereas there is an abundance of literature on Boko Haram’s histories and the impact of its insurgency on north-east Nigeria, analysis of Boko Haram’s military campaigning is still deficient. Attempting to fill this gap, this paper uses field findings and battlefield case studies from north-east Nigeria to highlight how Boko Haram’s overt front – its standing army – came to supplant its guerrilla operations as the main security threat to the frontier area.

This pivot towards military fighting, for a group initially composed of a few ragtag combatants, on the surface might seem surprising. Yet, whereas Boko Haram may lack the popular support required for ‘people’s war’, classic insurgency theories nevertheless hold some explanatory power for this deliberate shift: away from guerrilla warfare as the expedient of the weaker side, and towards the use of a large standing army of locals to swarm, and sometimes successfully overrun, state forces.     

From small wars to counterinsurgency: C.W. Gwynn, ‘Imperial Policing’ and transformation of doctrine

ABSTRACT

The complicated problematic of Imperial Policing in many respects still comes down to the principle of minimum force, and much of what we consider an integral part of the modern doctrine of counterinsurgency, is perceived as by-product of post-1945 colonial experience. Charles Gwynn wrote about it in his still underestimated text-book on internal security, ‘Imperial Policing’. As a result, there is a lack of clear understanding how colonial (based on local experience) knowledge was transformed into the expert (universal, transferable) knowledge in confronting rebellions at the doctrinal level. This article examines the work of Gwynn as part of a transitional stage from the age of global empires to the age of nuclear superpowers within the context of internal security doctrine. Adaptation to the new realities during the interwar period and after the World War II – reconfiguration of the British army epistemological system in confronting insurgencies – was a hard process. In this sense, the question about transformation of colonial knowledge into expert knowledge onto the field of internal security is a part of a more general and sensitive question about transition from colonialism to the post-colonial age.     

浅析军事医学语言的现实意义

军事医学语言是军事语言学的一个分支学科。古今中外的军事医学实践表明,军事医学语言在医学工作中发挥着重要作用,有时对医疗效果起着决定性作用。我国古代十分重视运用军事医学语言保障部队提高医疗效果的作用。但是,军事医学语言学科还不成体系,严重影响着军事医学工作科学效能的发挥。加快军事医学语言学科体系建设,已经成为当前巩固和提高部队战斗力中一个不可忽视的课题。     

军事指挥类期刊对军事学术研究的透视

军事指挥类期刊主要依靠各级军事指挥员,服务于部队全面建设。在军事学术研究队伍不断发展壮大的今天,军事指挥类期刊为部队“能打仗、打胜仗”军事理论研究服务,但军事学术研究存在着研究群体优势和合成作战理论优势发挥不够的问题。因而,要高度重视军事学术研究人才培养,加大经费投入,强化军兵种之间合成作战理论研究的力度。     

The Demand for Military Spending in Egypt

Egypt plays a pivotal role in the security of the Middle East as the doorway to Europe and its military expenditure reflects its involvement in the machinations of such an unstable region, showing considerable variation over the last 40?years. These characteristics make it a particularly interesting case study of the determinants of military spending. This paper specifies and estimates an econometric model of the Egyptian demand for military spending, taking into account important strategic and political factors. Both economic and strategic factors are found to play a role in determining military burden/spending, with clear positive effects of lagged military burden, suggesting some sort of institutional inertia, plus negative output and net exports effects. The strategic effect as a result of the impact of Israel’s military burden is mostly positive and significant, though its impact is reduced when the impact of important strategic events are taken into account. The military spending of Egypt’s allies Jordan and Syria generally seems to have had no effect on Egypt’s spending. These results are consistent over a range of econometric techniques.