CIAO DATE: 05/2013
Volume: 10, Issue: 4
Summer 2008
Cindy Strömer, Andrew Sullivan
The Strategic Studies Student Conference (S3C), is the largest student-organized conference for students across the country to participate in academic presentations. This year, the tenth anniversary of the conference, students from as far as Uzbekistan submitted over sixty paper proposals. The paper selection committee, consisting primarily of masters and PhD students from the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, grouped the successful proposals into nine conference panels. The twenty-seven successful participants mostly came from the University of Calgary and other Canadian universities. The conference enjoyed the participation of international student delegates from Amsterdam University and Helmut Schmidt University in Germany. Panel topics were diverse and comprehensive including: "Countering Terror and Fostering Security", "Security Through Red and White Coloured Lenses: Canadian Perspectives and Issues", "Making Security Private and Profitable: and Private Military Companies", "Security Set in Eastern Europe", "Transformation and Evaluation for Security", "Fuelling the Debate: World-wide Energy Security", "Words, Pictures, and Beyond: Communicating Security", "Deciphering Security: Cryptography and Intelligence", and "Building Security: Roles and Responsibilities".
Thoughts on Dissuasion (PDF)
Glen M. Segell
Implementing dissuasion against terrorists and rogue states is different from 'the laws of dissuasion' in nuclear affairs and conventional warfare. Centuries of writings on dissuasion have generated ambiguity due to the various uses and definitions. This adds to confusion amongst adversaries but also constrains allied co-operation. Clarification furthers the implementation of dissuasion amongst allies. Contemporary dissuasion rests on psychological means and retribution in countering extremist politics, radicalism militarism and suicide terrorists as well as missile defences against rogue states. Inherent to implementation of dissuasion are the identities of the self and the other. Dissuasion also requires pre-emptive armed force, control of pace rather than space, and multiple realities to be credible in the projection of force to dissuade an adversary. Dissuasion is the negation of adversaries' options.
Predictive GIS Modeling for Minefield Delineation in Post-conflict States (PDF)
John Adrian Wenkoff
This paper provides a comprehensive introduction to the field of Humanitarian Mine-action by outlining our current understanding of it, and how it is a factor in post-war state development. Focusing in on Mine-action at the strategic (vs. tactical or operational) scale, the paper outlines the current GIS based methods for solving the landmine problem as the backdrop for a GIS-data based experiment. The experiment entails the use of cutting edge Geo-statistical interpolation techniques, and produces GIS map layers that are predictive of landmine presence in Mozambique, Africa. Scientific discussion of the experiment is provided as well as direction for further research that is currently being conducted in this area.
Mikkel Dack
During the closing months of the Second World War, as the Red Army advanced on Berlin, a series of violent crimes swept across the Eastern Front. Soviet soldiers brutalized the German civilians they encountered, conducting a vengeful campaign of torture, rape, and murder. Despite the severity of these crimes, the attention that this topic has drawn from the academic community has been minimal. Due to political and social attitudes, including the widely accepted belief that the Germans were the sole perpetrators of war crimes, this imperative topic was relegated to a footnote of scholarly and public interest. The end of the Cold War ushered in a new era of historical analysis, as Soviet and East German archives were opened and scholarly research encouraged. In light of this amendment in attitude, recent historians have undertaken valuable reassessments, developed constructive arguments, and formulated insightful questions, questions which have since dominated this area of study and have initiated further analysis. Such questions include: Why did these crimes occur and why were they of such a brutal nature? How are “Nazi victims” to be perceived? And, how should blame and responsibility for such atrocities be dealt with? Although these questions have helped to advance the study of this once neglected topic there is still much room for scholarly expansion.
FIRST PRIZE: The Failure to Protect: Human Security and Canadian Foreign Policy in Afghanistan (PDF)
Wilfrid Greaves
This paper will examine the prima facie case that Canadian policy and practice in Afghanistan have not been consistent with the principles of human security and the protection of Afghan civilians. The failure to protect human security is twofold: first, international forces have inadequately addressed the threat posed to civilians by the Taliban insurgency and associated terrorist groups. Second, the tactics employed by international military forces have failed to adequately discriminate between civilians and combatants and have directly resulted in increasing numbers of civilian casualties. These failings indicate that Canada's practices in Afghanistan do not to cohere with its own policies regarding the protection of human security, violate the emergent international doctrine of human security, and seriously question the validity of official claims that Canada and the international community are protecting the human security of civilians in Afghanistan. This paper argues that the effective application of the principles of human security to the conduct of counterinsurgency by international military forces would greatly improve the likelihood of success in the long-term Afghan state-building project.
SECOND PRIZE: Throwing a Wrench Into Things: The Strategy of Radical Environmentalism (PDF)
Teale Phelps Bondaroff
A growing sense of urgency within the environmental movement has caused many activists to radicalize, and adopt more violent forms of protest, resorting to acts of sabotage and property destruction such as tree-spiking, ‘monkey-wrenching' heavy equipment, or fire-bombings. This paper defines actions which seek to cause material damage as acts of ecotage. Ecotage is appealing to many radical environmentalists, in as much as it is perceived as being effective. Through an analysis of the strategic reasons why ecotage is employed, this paper will examine the ways in which ecotage is perceived as effective. Ecotage is adopted by environmentalists for three primary reasons. First, ecotage produces powerful images (mind-bombs) that garner media attention and in so doing generate public awareness and sympathy for a particular issue. Secondly, ecotage is employed in order to cause enough property damage to drive up the costs of doing business to the point where the profitability of environmental degradation is so high that companies are forced to halt operations. And thirdly, organizations who engage in ecotage expand the environmental activist spectrum, resulting in other, more conventional organizations being considered as moderates. The ultimate goal of radical organizations that practice ecotage is the same as that of most conventional environmentalists; they seek to protect the environment, yet through their more violent tactics it is clear that they have adopted a divergent strategy. Ecotage is but one tool available to environmentalists, but if, through an application of its strategy, it can be seen as an effective tool, it is one which environmentalists are likely to reach for more often, and in so doing become a greater threat.
THIRD PRIZE: Coherence in Crisis: Groupthink, the news media, and the Iraq War (PDF)
Dan Fitzsimmons
This paper provides an analysis of the role of the news media on American military strategy in the 2003 Iraq War. It argues that American policy makers, displaying the symptoms of Irving Janis' theory groupthink, had more autonomy in decision-making because of barriers setup by the group to ignore external sources of criticism and taking action to limit doubts within the group on the strategy being employed. As a result, the US executive had more freedom of action than is frequently perceived by scholars supporting the notion that news media organizations possess extensive agenda-setting power, commonly known as the "CNN effect." The arguments of scholars supporting the agenda-setting power of media organizations are discussed and evaluated to determine if US military strategy was affected by the largely negative media presence in this conflict. This paper is unique because it shifts focus away from the field of foreign policy, and specifically the decision making process surrounding engagement and extraction from war zones, and instead focuses the news media's role in influencing strategic direction of a war. It concludes that the negative tone of the news media did not have a significant effect on military strategy due to strong cohesiveness of American elites throughout the conflict, and the inability of news makers to force any noticeable changes to military activities.