This book is intended to help fill a void in the literature while making a contribution to public awareness. Most books on national security affairs focus on substantive issues, such as nuclear proliferation, arguing in favor of one policy or another. This book addresses something more basic: how to conduct policy analysis in the field of national security, including foreign policy and defense strategy. It illuminates how key methods of analysis can be employed, by experts and nonexperts, to focus widely, address small details, or do both at the same time. To my knowledge, there is no other book quite like it.
This book addresses how to conduct policy analysis in the field of national security, including foreign policy and defense strategy. It is a philosophical and conceptual book for helphing people think deeply, clearly, and insightfully about complex policy issues. This books reflects the viewpoint that the best policies normally come from efforts to synthesize competing camps by drawing upon the best of each of them and by combining them to forge a sensible whole. While this book is written to be reader-friendly, it aspires to in-depth scholarship.
How can countries decide what kind of military forces they need, if threats are uncertain and history is full of strategic surprises? This is a question that is more pertinent than ever, as countries across the Asia-Pacific are faced with the military and economic rise of China. Uncertainty is inherent in defence planning, but different types of uncertainty mean that countries need to approach decisions about military force structure in different ways. This book examines four different basic frameworks for defence planning, and demonstrates how states can make decisions coherently about the structure and posture of their defence forces despite strategic uncertainty. It draws on case studies from the United States, Australian and New Zealand, each of which developed key concepts for their particular circumstances and risk perception in Asia. Success as well as failure in developing coherent defence planning frameworks holds lessons for the United States and other countries as they consider how best to structure their military forces for the uncertain challenges of the future.
This book examines US naval strategy and the role of American seapower over three decades, from the late 20th century to the early 21st century. This study uses the concept of seapower as a framework to explain the military and political application of sea power and naval force for the United States of America. It addresses the context in which strategy, and in particular US naval strategy and naval power, evolves and how US naval strategy was developed and framed in the international and national security contexts. It explains what drove and what constrained US naval strategy and examines selected instances where American sea power was directed in support of US defense and security policy ends – and whether that could be tied to what a given strategy proposed. The work utilizes naval capstone documents in the framework of broader maritime conceptual and geopolitical thinking, and discusses whether these documents had lasting influences in the strategic mind-set, the force structure, and other areas of American sea power. Overall, this work provides a deeper understanding of the crafting of US naval strategy since the final decade of the Cold War, its contextual and structural framework setting, and its application. To that end, the work bridges the gap between the thinking of American naval officers and planners on the one hand and academic analyses of Navy strategy on the other hand. It also presents the trends in the use of naval force for foreign policy objectives and into strategy-making in the American policy context. This book will be of much interest to students of naval power, maritime strategy, US national security and international relations in general.
Technology is a key driver of change in domestic security operations. It creates new capabilities and new opportunities for the collection and analysis of a broad range of data, intelligence and evidence. It is also enabling new and improved methods of detection, surveillance, identification and analysis that directly affect internal security. This creates many advantages, including new tools, new forms of data and new avenues for accessing and understanding information. It also creates fresh challenges, such as ensuring agencies have access to the skills and resources required to utilize technology effectively, with powers to match the pace of operational innovation, able to pre-empt countermeasures where possible. This paper takes a look at this complex landscape, amid the rapid developments brought by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and considers the UAE’s position in relation to it. Despite the challenges, the UAE is exceptionally well placed to take advantage of technological advances to improve internal security, due to its experience in acquiring advanced systems, its well-developed capacity to leverage cutting-edge technology and leading industry skills, and its culture of innovation. This paper is divided into four main sections that examine key issues within the complex relationship between technology and internal security. The first section examines technological drivers of change. These are the physical and digital technologies that drive significant changes in the security domain. The second section examines opportunities for states to harness technology as an asset in protecting and enhancing internal security. These include the new tools and data that are available to intelligence and law enforcement agencies. The third section considers the challenges for states in implementing technological solutions, including developing the expertise, legal authorities and protective countermeasures required to operate technological security solutions effectively. The final section examines the range of policy implications arising from technological influences on internal security. These include the investment needed to develop the requisite skills and knowledge for states to use technology to their advantage, while also denying those advantages to threat actors. Fortunately, the UAE is well positioned as a security actor in this area, benefiting from recent experience in implementing high-tech solutions to policy challenges, a demonstrable willingness to invest in the future, and a culture of innovation that can be applied to both technology and internal security.
This book investigates the relationship between international security governance, democratic civil-military relations and the relevance of strategy, as well as of absolute and relative gains, in norms formation in hybrid orders. Highlighting caveats of the legacy of Huntington’s paradigm of military professionalism, the book applies a robust methodology and data collected in four sample regions in Pakistan. It gauges the effects of international and local actors’ support in the Security Sector Reform domain and examines instances of civil-military interactions and military transition. The book also analyses determinants and strategies that can influence them to demonstrate the impact of global governance in norms diffusion, as well as of absolute and relative utility gains and incentives in normative change. The author generates a new theory pertaining to international organisations and actors as determinants of transformation processes and consequently sheds new light on the issue of global security governance, especially its impact on civil-military relations and democratisation in hybrid orders. The book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners in the field of global governance, civil-military relations, grand strategy and foreign policy as well as Asian politics, South Asian studies, peace, security and strategic studies, International Relations and political science in more general.
