Rethinking Asymmetric Threats
Rethinking Asymmetric Threats

Author: Stephen Blank

Publisher:

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 74

ISBN-13:

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For several years U.S. policymakers, officials, and writers on defense have employed the terms "asymmetric" or "asymmetry" to characterize everything from the nature of the threats we face to the nature of war and beyond. The author challenges the utility of using those terms to characterize the threats we face, one element of the broader debate over the nature of war, U.S. strategy, and the threats confronting us. As a work of critique, it aims to make an important contribution to the threat debate. A correct assessment of the nature of the threat environment is essential to any sound defense doctrine for the U.S. Army and the military as a whole. That correct assessment can only be reached through a process of critique and debate.

Rethinking Asymmetric Threats
Rethinking Asymmetric Threats

Author: Stephen Blank

Publisher:

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781584871392

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For several years U.S. policymakers, officials, and writers on defense have employed the terms "asymmetric" or "asymmetry" to characterize everything from the nature of the threats we face to the nature of war and beyond. The author challenges the utility of using those terms to characterize the threats we face, one element of the broader debate over the nature of war, U.S. strategy, and the threats confronting us. As a work of critique, it aims to make an important contribution to the threat debate. A correct assessment of the nature of the threat environment is essential to any sound defense doctrine for the U.S. Army and the military as a whole. That correct assessment can only be reached through a process of critique and debate.

Rethinking Asymmetric Threats
Rethinking Asymmetric Threats

Author: Stephen J. Blank

Publisher:

Published: 2014-07-06

Total Pages: 69

ISBN-13: 9781312335035

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Assessment of the threat environment is a critical element in the formulation of any state's strategy and defense doctrine. It also should be an inherently critical process that seeks to free policymakers from incorrect, antiquated, or misconceived perceptions about the threat. Consequently, the nature of the threat(s) the United States or any other government faces is the subject of a never-ending debate. For several years U.S. policymakers, officials, and writers on defense have employed the terms "asymmetric" or "asymmetry" to characterize everything from the nature of the threats we face to the nature of war and beyond. This monograph challenges the utility of using those terms to characterize the threats we face, one element of the broader debate over the nature of war, U.S. strategy, and the threats confronting us. As a work of critique, it aims to make an important contribution to the threat debate.

Street Gangs
Street Gangs

Author: Max G. Manwaring

Publisher:

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 68

ISBN-13:

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The primary thrust of the monograph is to explain the linkage of contemporary criminal street gangs (that is, the gang phenomenon or third generation gangs) to insurgency in terms f the instability it wreaks upon government and the concomitant challenge to state sovereignty. Although there are differences between gangs and insurgents regarding motives and modes of operations, this linkage infers that gang phenomena are mutated forms of urban insurgency. In these terms, these "new" nonstate actors must eventually seize political power in order to guarantee the freedom of action and the commercial environment they want. The common denominator that clearly links the gang phenomenon to insurgency is that the third generation gangs' and insurgents' ultimate objective is to depose or control the governments of targeted countries. As a consequence, the "Duck Analogy" applies. Third generation gangs look like ducks, walk like ducks, and act like ducks - a peculiar breed, but ducks nevertheless! This monograph concludes with recommendations for the United States and other countries to focus security and assistance responses at the strategic level. The intent is to help leaders achieve strategic clarity and operate more effectively in the complex politically dominated, contemporary global security arena.

Rethinking Violence
Rethinking Violence

Author: Erica Chenoweth

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0262014203

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An original argument about the causes and consequences of political violence and the range of strategies employed.

Japan’s Decision For War In 1941: Some Enduring Lessons
Japan’s Decision For War In 1941: Some Enduring Lessons

Author: Dr. Jeffrey Record

Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing

Published: 2015-11-06

Total Pages: 105

ISBN-13: 1786252961

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Japan’s decision to attack the United States in 1941 is widely regarded as irrational to the point of suicidal. How could Japan hope to survive a war with, much less defeat, an enemy possessing an invulnerable homeland and an industrial base 10 times that of Japan? The Pacific War was one that Japan was always going to lose, so how does one explain Tokyo’s decision? Did the Japanese recognize the odds against them? Did they have a concept of victory, or at least of avoiding defeat? Or did the Japanese prefer a lost war to an unacceptable peace? Dr. Jeffrey Record takes a fresh look at Japan’s decision for war, and concludes that it was dictated by Japanese pride and the threatened economic destruction of Japan by the United States. He believes that Japanese aggression in East Asia was the root cause of the Pacific War, but argues that the road to war in 1941 was built on American as well as Japanese miscalculations and that both sides suffered from cultural ignorance and racial arrogance. Record finds that the Americans underestimated the role of fear and honor in Japanese calculations and overestimated the effectiveness of economic sanctions as a deterrent to war, whereas the Japanese underestimated the cohesion and resolve of an aroused American society and overestimated their own martial prowess as a means of defeating U.S. material superiority. He believes that the failure of deterrence was mutual, and that the descent of the United States and Japan into war contains lessons of great and continuing relevance to American foreign policy and defense decision-makers.

Work's Intimacy
Work's Intimacy

Author: Melissa Gregg

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-04-23

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0745637469

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This book provides a long-overdue account of online technology and its impact on the work and lifestyles of professional employees. It moves between the offices and homes of workers in the knew "knowledge" economy to provide intimate insight into the personal, family, and wider social tensions emerging in today’s rapidly changing work environment. Drawing on her extensive research, Gregg shows that new media technologies encourage and exacerbate an older tendency among salaried professionals to put work at the heart of daily concerns, often at the expense of other sources of intimacy and fulfillment. New media technologies from mobile phones to laptops and tablet computers, have been marketed as devices that give us the freedom to work where we want, when we want, but little attention has been paid to the consequences of this shift, which has seen work move out of the office and into cafés, trains, living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms. This professional "presence bleed" leads to work concerns impinging on the personal lives of employees in new and unforseen ways. This groundbreaking book explores how aspiring and established professionals each try to cope with the unprecedented intimacy of technologically-mediated work, and how its seductions seem poised to triumph over the few remaining relationships that may stand in its way.

Security and Environmental Change
Security and Environmental Change

Author: Simon Dalby

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-05-08

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 0745658474

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In the early years of the new millennium, hurricanes lashed the Caribbean and flooded New Orleans as heat waves and floods seemed to alternate in Europe. Snows were disappearing on Mount Kilimanjaro while the ice caps on both poles retreated. The resulting disruption caused to many societies and the potential for destabilizing international migration has meant that the environment has become a political priority.The scale of environmental change caused by globalization is now so large that security has to be understood as an ecological process. A new geopolitics is long overdue. In this book Simon Dalby provides an accessible and engaging account of the challenges we face in responding to security and environmental change. He traces the historical roots of current thinking about security and climate change to show the roots of the contemporary concern and goes on to outline modern thinking about securitization which uses the politics of invoking threats as a central part of the analysis. He argues that to understand climate change and the dislocations of global ecology, it is necessary to look back at how ecological change is tied to the expansion of the world economic system over the last few centuries. As the global urban system changes on a local and global scale, the world’s population becomes vulnerable in new ways. In a clear and careful analysis, Dalby shows that theories of human security now require a much more nuanced geopolitical imagination if they are to grapple with these new vulnerabilities and influence how we build more resilient societies to cope with the coming disruptions. This book will appeal to level students and scholars of geography, environmental studies, security studies and international politics, as well as to anyone concerned with contemporary globalization and its transformation of the biosphere.

Future War
Future War

Author: Christopher Coker

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2015-11-12

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1509502351

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Will tomorrow's wars be dominated by autonomous drones, land robots and warriors wired into a cybernetic network which can read their thoughts? Will war be fought with greater or lesser humanity? Will it be played out in cyberspace and further afield in Low Earth Orbit? Or will it be fought more intensely still in the sprawling cities of the developing world, the grim black holes of social exclusion on our increasingly unequal planet? Will the Great Powers reinvent conflict between themselves or is war destined to become much 'smaller' both in terms of its actors and the beliefs for which they will be willing to kill? In this illuminating new book Christopher Coker takes us on an incredible journey into the future of warfare. Focusing on contemporary trends that are changing the nature and dynamics of armed conflict, he shows how conflict will continue to evolve in ways that are unlikely to render our century any less bloody than the last. With insights from philosophy, cutting-edge scientific research and popular culture, Future War is a compelling and thought-provoking meditation on the shape of war to come.