CIAO DATE: 03/2015
Volume: 15, Issue: 4
March 2015
Hic Sunt Dracones! (PDF)
Terry Terriff, James Keeley, John Ferris
The US and a coalition of allies are once again intervening in the Middle East. This time it is in response to the rapid military advancement of Daesh, the acronym Arabic speakers use for the Arabic name of ISIS, Al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham. Some ten weeks into the start of military operations a common view is that the coalition’s aerial campaign has only had limited success at best. On the plus side, coalition air power coupled with local forces on the ground were able to save a great many Iraqi Yazidis who were being threatened by Daesh, but equally a great many of this sectarian minority were massacred and, in the case of women and girls, raped or sold into sexual slavery. The Kurds subsequent to the initial retreat of their much vaunted Peshmerga forces have been able to stabilize their fighting lines against Daesh and regain control of the important Mosul dam. This particular success is in part due to the Kurds themselves and in part due to the support of coalition air strikes and delivery of supplies, but it also appears to be due in part to Daesh turning its focus to Anbar and northern Syria. On the negative side, Daesh not only continues to hold Mosul, among many other Iraqi cities and towns, but it has also expanded its control of territory in Anbar province from where it now poses a potential threat to Baghdad and areas in and around the Iraqi capital city. Daesh also made significant advances in northern Syria where it threatened to overrun the Kurdish city of Kobane on the Syria-Turkey border, creating the looming prospect of the massacre of the fighters and civilians still there. Over the past few days the intensification of coalition air strikes in and around this city appears to have halted and at least partially pushed back the Daesh assault, but the city and its inhabitants are far from being safe as it could still fall in the days and weeks to come.
Emmanuel O. Ojo
This paper is an attempt to consider the role of the military in Nigeria’s democratic transitions. The paper has one major thrust – an in-depth analysis of military role in democratic transitions in Nigeria - the fundamental question, however, is: can the military ever be expected or assumed to play any major role in building democracy? The reality on the ground in Africa is that the military as an institution has never been completely immune from politics and the role of nation-building. However, whether they have been doing that perfectly or not is another question entirely which this paper shall address.
Friction, Chaos and Order(s): Clausewitz, Boyd and Command Approaches (PDF)
Martin Samuels
A former writer of British military doctrine, Jim Storr, recently lamented that, although many books explore what happens in war (history) or why wars happen (international relations), very few focus on how wars should be fought (warfare).1 He concluded this reflects warfare’s status as ‘a poorly developed discipline’. Consequently, ‘It is incoherent, contains a range of poorly described phenomena and is pervaded by paradox.’2 The underdeveloped discourse concerning warfare, and within it the limited consideration of different approaches to command, may be considered an important contributor to the longstanding gulf between the doctrine of Mission Command espoused by the United States and British armies and actual operational practice,3 such that the doctrine is ‘realized only in some places some of the time’.
The Pivot to Asia: The Persistent Logics of Geopolitics and the Rise of China (PDF)
William C. Mayborn
The 2011 pivot illustrated the persistence of post-World War II geopolitical thinking that seeks to prevent a single state or coalition from dominating Eurasia. For nearly seven decades, the U.S. has relied on a forward deployed presence and alliances in the Asia Pacific to maintain stability and deter conflict. This article will analyze the long-standing policy and the continuation of the policy with the 2011 pivot, and will explore the logics behind the policy. Next, the paper will explore three topics: the current-day situation in Eurasia, how nuclear weapons have altered the geopolitical logics, and the rise of China as an economic and military power in Asia.
Clandestine Communication in Historic China (PDF)
Ralph Sawyer
As military forces grew in strength, tactics evolved, and warfare became more lethal in ancient China, the need for communication between the political authorities and leaders in the field, as well as among commanders and their subordinates, was increasingly recognized.
David C. Wright
The Sunflower Student Movement in Taiwan (March-April 2014) was an authentic public cri de coeur over the political fate and destiny of the island. What started out as a storming and occupation of the island's legislature by activists opposed to the controversial Trade in Services Agreement quickly became a much broader public protest against the ruling Kuomintang party's apparent lack of concern about the political dimensions and implications of ever-increasing economic integration of the fiercely and proudly democratic island with the People’s Republic of China, a state on the mainland run by a ruthless anti-democratic dictatorship. The Sunflower Movement has changed some minds in Taiwan, but how many still remains unclear. It seems likely that most people on the island who support the Kuomintang and the trade in services agreement and who have values higher than freedom, democracy, and human rights will continue to see the Sunflower Movement as a civil disturbance launched by left-wing academic ideologues bent on stirring up trouble among lazy, spoiled students and the island’s economically innumerate rabble. The story is quite different with a large and growing segment of the electorate that values Taiwan’s democratic system above all else. They have put Ma Ying-jeou, Taiwan’s now wildly unpopular pro-China president, on notice that he will no longer have a relatively easy time using economic integration with the PRC to nudge the island gradually and incrementally towards political control by Beijing. Taiwan's economic integration with the PRC will likely continue, but now less ineluctably towards political unification than before. It is not likely that a majority of Taiwan’s electorate would willingly and wittingly trade their political birthright for a mess of economic pottage. Strategically, this means that the so-called Taiwan issue will likely linger on for longer than had previously been expected. Mao may have been right in 1975 when he speculated to Henry Kissinger that the ultimate resolution of Taiwan’s status might take a hundred years.
Matthew Wiseman
The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 remains one of the most highly contested episodes of the Cold War. Both academic and general historians alike continuously attempt to reconstruct the events that occurred during those harrowing two weeks as well as the subsequent aftermath. Historical examinations have unravelled some of the mystery which emerged from questions asked of the crisis and the subsequent period following its closure, but an abundance of scholarship on the topic has produced historical fallacies as well. It is for this reason that Sheldon Stern, official historian at the John F. Kennedy Library from 1977 to 1999, wrote The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality.
Scott Fitzsimmons. Mercenaries in Asymmetric Conflicts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. (PDF)
Kai Chen
The history of mercenaries can be tracked back to the Greek mercenaries that fought for the Persian Empire during the early classic era. The decades after World War II have witnessed the re-emergence of mercenaries around the world. It’s worth noting that academia pays little attention to mercenaries involved in asymmetric conflicts, and leaves several critical questions unanswered. So how do we measure the outcome of the asymmetric conflicts involving mercenaries? Why do some mercenaries prevail in front of materially superior opponents, while other mercenaries fail? Are there any testable theoretical explanations for predicting mercenaries’ military performance in future asymmetric conflicts? In Mercenaries in Asymmetric Conflicts, Scott Fitzsimmons provides well-supported answers to the questions above, explores the causal relations between military culture and effectiveness, and highlights that culturally-determined military effectiveness has more influence on mercenaries’ military performance in asymmetric conflicts than the materially-determined military effectiveness.
Danny Garrett-Rempel
In his book, It Takes More than a Network: The Iraqi Insurgency and Organizational Adaptation, Chad C. Serena attempts to analyze the organizational inputs and outputs of the Iraqi insurgency in an effort to arrive at a better understanding of what part these features played in both its initial success and eventual failure. The thesis of Serena’s book is that the Iraqi insurgency failed to achieve longer-term organizational goals due to the fact that many of the insurgency’s early organizational strengths later became weaknesses that degraded the insurgency’s ability to adapt (4). Serena employs a blend of technical analysis, in his assessment of the inner workings of complex covert networks, and empirical examples, which he draws from the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. This approach is successful in providing insight into the nature of the organizational adaptation of the Iraqi insurgency as well as in laying a framework for the future study of similarly organized martial groups.
Rebecca Jensen
The historians of the Annales School developed an approach that emphasized long-term regional histories based upon social structures and worldviews, in part because they believed the narrowness of political and diplomatic history to be reductive. The first half of Mike Martin’s An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict, adapted from his doctoral research at King’s College and drawing on his experience as an army officer in Afghanistan, evokes this approach, while the second half explores how the absence of such a grounding in the local dynamics of Helmand province resulted in a profound misunderstanding of parties to the conflict and their goals, and thus a flawed and sometimes counterproductive approach to military and political efforts there. An Intimate War makes a solid argument that the narratives driving the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) were largely mistaken, and that misperception accounted for poor policy and misguided operations; it also raises questions for future research, including why organizations and individuals adopted and hewed to inadequate models, and implicitly how this might be avoided in future military engagements.
Thomas H. Henriksen. America and the Rogue States. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. (PDF)
Matt Preston
In America and the Rogue States, Thomas Henriksen lays out the relationships that exist, and have existed, between America and the states that made up George W. Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil.’ Henriksen outlines the history of the interactions between the United States and North Korea, pre-invasion Iraq, and Iran, and through this draws out a number of themes. He also shows that the ways the relationships have played out are highly situational and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. In the last chapter, Henriksen explores American relationships with a number of states that were either once considered rogue or could become rogue, like Libya, Syria, and Cuba, referring to them as either “lesser rogues” or “troublesome states.” These states have remained “a puzzle for US foreign policy” (1) and are characterized by three things: autocratic governance, sponsorship of terrorism, and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Matt Preston
Stefano Recchia and Jennifer Welsh have brought together in this tome a number of authors intending to essentially see what can be learnt from early modern political philosophers about just war and humanitarian intervention. They attempt to have all works in the volume discuss three themes and answer two essential questions. The first theme centers on the issues concerning jus ad bellum (the legitimate reasons for going to war). In this, the editors identify the main question of when intervention is permissible.They say that the work of early modern philosophers broadly are applicable to today’s environment, since while the context may have changed, those philosophers still address important issues such as whether the existence of a dictatorial regime is enough to intervene, or whether there must be proof of wrongdoing or genocide in order to do so. While these appear to be very modern issues, and are termed in modern ways, they are questions thinkers have struggled with since the Roman period, as shown in Richard Tuck’s article “Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf on Humanitarian Intervention.”