分兵集火、凡船皆战——浅析美军“分布式杀伤”概念

通过梳理美军\"分布式杀伤\"概念的提出背景、提出过程、内涵意义,阐述了\"分布式杀伤\"的三条制胜之道,即符合海战客观环境、符合科技进步方向、符合战争演变趋势。此外,文章还分析了\"分布式杀伤\"实际执行过程中的几大难点和缺陷,包括指挥控制问题、舰船能力问题、成本和后勤补给问题、防御有效性问题。     

Beyond balancing? Intrastate conflict and US grand strategy

Grand strategic theorists share an historical emphasis on interstate conflict, yet in contrast to the more frequent intrastate conflicts, these represent only 7 of the some 273 US military deployments since 1900. We argue that these intrastate conflicts limit the utility of regional balances of power in mitigating forms of conflict that the US may consider inimical to its national security interests. When considering potential changes to US force posture and grand strategy, American coercive statecraft should be theorised along a broader strategic continuum encompassing the full range of conflict.     

Brinkmanship,not COIN,in Pakistan’s post-9/11 Internal War

Politics is critical to making sense of Pakistani successes and failures in dealing with non-state armed groups. This includes domestic political currents; regional political currents; and the global impetus of the post-9/11 era. How these currents overlap renders to any reading of insurgency in Pakistan real complexity. This article engages with this complexity rather than shirking from it. Its hypothesis is that while the insurgency bordering Afghanistan has been an epicentre of Pakistani military efforts to fight the Taliban, this theatre is in of itself insufficiently inclusive to grasp the nature of Pakistan’s security challenges and its consequent responses.     

Goodbye to all that? Institutionalist theory,U.S. alliances,and Donald Trump

In an important and stimulating article, Stephan Frühling and Andrew O’Neil argue in favor of applying institutionalist theory to understand the alliance politics of U.S. nuclear weapons strategy. But what promise does institutionalist theory really hold in thinking about highly unequal alliances nested in their particular threat environments? I argue that much work remains to be done to determine how much better institutionalist variables explain intra-alliance dynamics over alternative arguments that emphasize power and interests. Balances of power and the nature of threat environments may already account for key aspects of extended deterrent relationships supported by the United States in Europe and Asia. Ironically, the implication of this more traditional interpretation of alliances is that more continuity than change will characterize how Donald Trump will manage U.S. security relationships as President.     

Is Britain a force for good? Investigating British citizens’ narrative understanding of war

It is commonly assumed in the foreign policy literature that narratives are uniquely persuasive and thus integral to obtaining public support for war. Yet, empirical research on “strategic narrative” is often vague on both the concept of narrative and how it persuades. Moreover, the stories publics use to interpret war are rarely examined. This paper offers a novel approach to studying “from the ground up” the war stories of individual British citizens. It examines public interpretations of war through emplotment: the way people select and link events to create a coherent story. Examining the wars people include and those they silence, it illustrates how a diverse range of citizens morally evaluates Britain’s military role, be it as a Force for Good, a Force for Ill or a country Learning from its Mistakes. In doing so, the paper offers an alternative methodological approach to studying how individual citizens understand war.