At no time since the end of the Cold War has interest been higher in Russian security issues and the role played in this by the modernization of Russia’s Armed Forces. The continued transformation of its Armed Forces from Cold War legacy towards a modern combat capable force presents many challenges for the Kremlin. Moscow’s security concerns domestically, in the turbulent North Caucasus, and internationally linked to the Arab Spring, as well as its complex relations with the US and NATO and its role in the aftermath of the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014 further raises the need to present an informed analytical survey of the country’s military, past, present and future. This collection addresses precisely the nature of the challenges facing Russian policymakers as they struggle to rebuild combat capable military to protect Russian interests in the twenty-first century. This book was based on a special issue of the Journal of Slavic Military Studies.
In Finding the Target, Frederick W. Kagan describes the three basic transformations within the U.S. military since Vietnam. First was the move to an all-volunteer force and a new generation of weapons systems in the 1970s. Second was the emergence of stealth technology and precision-guided munitions in the 1980s. Third was the information technology that followed the fall of the Soviet Union and the first Gulf War. This last could have insured the U.S. continuing military preeminence, but this goal was compromised by Clinton's drawing down of our armed forces in the 1990s and Bush's response to 9/11 and the global war on terror. The issue of transformation leads Kagan to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's vision of a ''new ''military; the conduct of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; and the disconnect between grand strategic visions such as the Bush Doctrine's idea of ''preemption ''and the underfunding of military force structures that are supposed to achieve such goals.
This book provides an authoritative account of how the US, British, and French armies have transformed since the end of the Cold War. All three armies have sought to respond to changes in their strategic and socio-technological environments by developing more expeditionary capable and networked forces. Drawing on extensive archival research, hundreds of interviews, and unprecedented access to official documents, the authors examine both the process and the outcomes of army transformation, and ask how organizational interests, emerging ideas, and key entrepreneurial leaders interact in shaping the direction of military change. They also explore how programs of army transformation change over time, as new technologies moved from research to development, and as lessons from operations were absorbed. In framing these issues, they draw on military innovation scholarship and, in addressing them, produce findings with general relevance for the study of how militaries innovate.
The U.S. military is no longer based on a Cold War self-sufficient model. Today's armed forces are a third smaller than they were during the Cold War, and yet are expected to do as much if not more than they did during those years. As a result, a transformation is occurring in the way the U.S. government expects the military to conduct operations—with much of that transformation contingent on the use of contractors to deliver support to the armed forces during military campaigns and afterwards. Contractors and War explains the reasons behind this transformation and evaluates how the private sector will shape and be shaped by future operations. The authors are drawn from a range of policy, legislative, military, legal, and academic backgrounds. They lay out the philosophical arguments supporting the use of contractors in combat and stabilization operations and present a spectrum of arguments that support and criticize emergent private sector roles. The book provides fresh policy guidance to those who will research, direct, and carry out future deployments.
At a time when unprecedented change in international affairs is forcing governments, citizens, and armed forces everywhere to re-assess the question of whether military solutions to political problems are possible any longer, Martin van Creveld has written an audacious searching examination of the nature of war and of its radical transformation in our own time. For 200 years, military theory and strategy have been guided by the Clausewitzian assumption that war is rational - a reflection of national interest and an extension of politics by other means. However, van Creveld argues, the overwhelming pattern of conflict in the post-1945 world no longer yields fully to rational analysis. In fact, strategic planning based on such calculations is, and will continue to be, unrelated to current realities. Small-scale military eruptions around the globe have demonstrated new forms of warfare with a different cast of characters - guerilla armies, terrorists, and bandits - pursuing diverse goals by violent means with the most primitive to the most sophisticated weapons. Although these warriors and their tactics testify to the end of conventional war as we've known it, the public and the military in the developed world continue to contemplate organized violence as conflict between the super powers. At this moment, armed conflicts of the type van Creveld describes are occurring throughout the world. From Lebanon to Cambodia, from Sri Lanka and the Philippines to El Salvador, the Persian Gulf, and the strife-torn nations of Eastern Europe, violent confrontations confirm a new model of warfare in which tribal, ethnic, and religious factions do battle without high-tech weapons or state-supported armies and resources. This low-intensity conflict challenges existing distinctions between civilian and solder, individual crime and organized violence, terrorism and war. In the present global atmosphere, practices that for three centuries have been considered uncivilized, such as capturing civilians or even entire communities for ransom, have begun to reappear. Pursuing bold and provocative paths of inquiry, van Creveld posits the inadequacies of our most basic ideas as to who fights wars and why and broaches the inevitability of man's need to "play" at war. In turn brilliant and infuriating, this challenge to our thinking and planning current and future military encounters is one of the most important books on war we are likely to read in our lifetime.
In 1950, when he commissioned the first edition of The Armed Forces Officer, Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall told its author, S.L.A. Marshall, that "American military officers, of whatever service, should share common ground ethically and morally." In this new edition, the authors methodically explore that common ground, reflecting on the basics of the Profession of Arms, and the officer's special place and distinctive obligations within that profession and especially to the Constitution.
At the end of the Great War, the U.S. Army faced the challenge of integrating what it had learned in the failures and ultimate success of its war effort. During the interwar years the army sought to balance readiness and modernization in a period of limited resources and technological advances with profound implications for the conduct of warfare. In After the Trenches, William O. Odom traces the development of combat doctrine between the world wars through an examination of the army's primary doctrine manuals, the Field Service Regulations. The Field Service Regulations of 1923 successfully assimilated the experiences of the First World War and translated them into viable tactical practice, Odom argues in this unique study. Rapidly developing technologies generated more efficient tools of war and greatly expanded the scale, tempo, and complexity of warfare. Personnel and materiel shortages led to a decline in the quality of army doctrine evidenced in the 1939 regulations. Examining the development of doctrine and the roles of key personalities such as John Pershing, Hugh Drum, George Lynch, Frank Parker, and Lesley McNair, Odom concludes that the successive revisions of the manual left the army scurrying to modernize its woefully outdated doctrine on the eve of the new war. This impressively researched study of the doctrine of the interwar army fills a significant gap in our understanding of the development of the U.S. Army during the first half of the twentieth century. It will serve scholars and others interested in military history as the standard reference on the subject. Moreover, many of the challenges and conditions that existed seventy years ago resemble those faced by today's army. This study of the army's historical responses to a declining military budget and an ever-changing technology will broaden the perspectives of those who must deal with these important contemporary issues.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States Army has been reengineered and downsized more thoroughly than any other business. In the early 1990s, General Sullivan, army chief of staff, and Colonel Harper, his key strategic planner, took the post-Cold War army into the Information Age. Faced with a 40 percent reduction in staff and funding, they focused on new peacetime missions, dismantled a cumbersome bureaucracy, reinvented procedures, and set the guidelines for achieving a vast array of new goals. Hope Is Not a Method explains how they did it and shows how their experience is extremely relevant to today's businesses. From how to stay on top of long-range issues to how to maintain a productive work force during times of change, it offers invaluable lessons in leadership and provides proven tactics any business can implement.
This book explores the idea of arevolution in military affairs (RMA), which underpins the transformational agenda of the US military, and examines its implications for smaller states.The strategic studies literature on the RMA tends to be American-centric and directed towards the strategic problems of the US military. This volume seeks to fill t
The response of an autocratic nation's armed forces is crucial to the outcome of democratization movements throughout the world. But what exact internal conditions have led to real-world democratic transitions, and have external forces helped or hurt? Here, experts with military and policy backgrounds, some of whom have played a role in democratic transitions, present instructive case studies of democratic movements. Focusing on the specific domestic context and the many influences that have contributed to successful transitions, the authors write about democratic civil-military relations in fourteen countries and five world regions. The cases include Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Egypt, Hungary, Indonesia, Lebanon, Nigeria, Philippines, Senegal, South Africa, Spain, Syria, and Thailand, augmented by regional overviews of Asia, Europe, Latin America, North Africa and the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. Contributors: Richard Akum (Council for the Development of Social Sciences in Africa), Ecoma Alaga (African Security Sector Network), Muthiah Alagappa (Institute of Security and International Studies, Malaysia), Suchit Bunbongkarn (Institute of Security and International Studies, Thailand), Juan Emilio Cheyre (Center for International Studies, Catholic University of Chile), Biram Diop (Partners for Democratic Change--African Institute for Security Sector Transformation, Dakar), Raymundo B. Ferrer (Nickel Asia Corporation), Humberto Corado Figueroa (Ministry of Defense, El Salvador), Vilmos Hamikus (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Hungary), Julio Hang (Argentine Council for International Relations), Marton Harsanyi (Stockholm University), Carolina G. Hernandez (University of the Philippines; Institute for Strategic and Development Studies), Raymond Maalouf (Defense expert, Lebanon), Tannous Mouawad (Middle East Studies, Lebanon), Matthew Rhodes (George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies), Martin Rupiya (African Public Policy and Research Institute), Juan C. Salgado Brocal (Academic and Consultant Council for Military Research and Studies, Chile), Narcis Serra (Barcelona Institute of International Studies), Rizal Sukma (Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Jakarta).
