Sept. 30, 2014

Low Cost, High Returns: Getting More from International Partnerships

Unbeknownst to most Americans, over 8,000 international military personnel are trained or educated annually in the United States at the invitation of the U.S. Government, studying every aspect of the military profession. The most select officers with future leadership potential are invited to participate in senior Professional Military Education (PME) courses alongside U.S. officers at schools such as National Defense University (NDU) and the Army, Naval, Air, and Marine Corps War Colleges. Many of these students are funded by the United States through security assistance programs such as the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program, which has an annual cost of over $100 million. This is a significant investment of time and treasure by the United States, and as we will show, the initial returns of these programs are high.

Sept. 30, 2014

Asymmetry Is Strategy, Strategy Is Asymmetry

Much of the strategic studies literature of the past two decades identifies profound novelty in the conduct and challenges of modern war, novelty that ultimately calls into question the nature and even existence of war. War has allegedly now been transformed from a regular, conventional, purportedly symmetric exercise into an irregular, unconventional, asymmetric event, which must be understood anew.

Sept. 30, 2014

Is Military Science “Scientific”?

The term military science generally describes the body of theories, concepts, and methods for employing armed forces. However, as an academic discipline it is ill defined, drawing from a patchwork of curricula including history, foreign affairs, security studies, leadership, operations management, and systems engineering, as well as other elements of the physical and social sciences. Notably, the Department of Defense dictionary does not even provide a definition. This vague categorization is somewhat reflective of the term’s diminished status from its 19th-century usage when Military Science was frequently capitalized and placed alongside Physics, Philosophy, and other well-established academic disciplines.

Sept. 30, 2014

The Best Man for the Job? Combatant Commanders and the Politics of Jointness

The U.S. military today fights jointly. A joint commander—reporting to the Secretary of Defense—commands all Service components during military operations. And as a key sign of this jointness, combatant commanders no longer come solely from a single Service as they once did. In fact, the combatant commanders and their control of operations are often considered the greatest expression of jointness.

Sept. 30, 2014

A Potent Vector: Assessing Chinese Cruise Missile Developments

The numerous, increasingly advanced cruise missiles being developed and deployed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have largely flown under the public’s radar. This article surveys PRC cruise missile programs and assesses their implications for broader People’s Liberation Army (PLA) capabilities, especially in a Taiwan scenario.

Sept. 30, 2014

Determining Hostile Intent in Cyberspace

According to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hostile intent is defined as the threat of imminent use of force against the United States, U.S. forces, or other designated persons or property. It is the indication, the belief, a commander has that an adversary is about to attack. That belief provides the groundwork for “anticipatory self-defense,” an American legal concept that allows a commander to attack before being attacked.

Sept. 30, 2014

Understanding the Enemy: The Enduring Value of Technical and Forensic Exploitation

The escalation of improvised explosive device (IED) incidents and related casualties during Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom led to a new intelligence field related to technical intelligence (TECHINT) called weapons technical intelligence (WTI), which combined technical and forensic IED exploitation techniques to link persons, places, things, and events. WTI operationalizes technical and forensic activities by fusing the technical, forensic, and biometric disciplines to produce actionable intelligence for countering threat networks. It is an especially powerful tool against terrorist organizations that rely on IEDs as a primary weapon in their arsenals. Given the enduring nature of the IED problem, careful consideration is required to ensure that we have the necessary counter-IED capability and capacity to meet future threats across the range of military operations. Across this range and at each level of war from tactical to strategic, TECHINT and WTI make critical contributions to joint warfare and military decisionmaking.

Sept. 30, 2014

Challenges in Coalition Unconventional Warfare: The Allied Campaign in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945

During World War II, operatives and military advisors of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was a precursor to both the current Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. Special Forces, conducted a challenging unconventional warfare (UW) campaign against the Axis forces with and through guerrilla resistance elements in Yugoslavia. The resistance movement effectively fixed in place 35 German and Italian divisions, consisting of roughly 660,000 soldiers in the western Balkan region during 1941–1945.1 This campaign rendered them strategically irrelevant by preventing their use in other theaters. The combined United Kingdom (UK)–United States (U.S.) contingent achieved this effect with never more than 100 Allied personnel on the ground in the denied area. The number of Axis personnel killed in the Balkans is estimated at 450,000.2 This extremely favorable force ratio and its associated effects commend UW as a low-cost, high-reward method of warfare.

Sept. 30, 2014

Book Review: You Cannot Surge Trust

You Cannot Surge Trust is a valuable review of the unique relationships that bind the U.S. Navy and its British, Canadian, and Australian counterparts. Edited by Sandra Doyle of the Naval History and Heritage Command, the book is a collection of essays by naval historians from the United States, Australia, Canada, and United Kingdom (UK) that provide insights drawn from common experiences derived from combined peace support operations between 1991 and 2003. These insights offer useful pointers for the U.S. Navy leadership as it seeks to establish close cooperative arrangements with other navies around the world.

Sept. 30, 2014

Book Review: Engineers of Victory

Best-selling author and historian Paul Kennedy, the Dilworth Professor of History and Director of International Security Studies at Yale University, has written a stimulating book about the middle—the middle years of World War II, the middle or operational level of war, and the middlemen, problem-solvers, and midlevel commanders that made victory possible. In doing so, he focuses attention on a largely unexplored portion of the war’s history and provides professional historians and general readers a deeper understanding of how and why the Allies won World War II.