Journal of Strategic Studies

Piracy off the Horn of Africa has grown substantially in recent years: 217 ships reported being attacked by Somali pirates during 2009. Although less than one percent of ships transiting the Gulf of Aden in 2009 suffered attacks, Somali piracy creates considerable economic costs and distortions. Some ships now routinely avoid the region and the estimated additional costs of specialty marine risk insurance for ships using the Gulf of Aden trade route were estimated to be in the region of US$ 400mn for 2009. International naval forces (including missions from the EU and NATO) are present in the Gulf of Aden to ensure the delivery of food aid to displaced people in Somalia, to protect shipping in the Gulf of Aden and to deter pirates from operating in the region. In our research we show that the naval presence has prevented an explosion of piracy in the Gulf of Aden, but does not appear to have had a significant deterrent effect on pirates. Some ship owners gamble that they will not be attacked and do not co-operate with the navy, thereby providing easy targets for pirates. In the meantime pirates' risk of injury, detention and trial in encounters with the navies remains relatively low. In any case sea-based naval operations will have limited success as long as Somalia remains a failed state. However, we show that partial improvements in local stability and governance are likely to increase pirate attacks. Therefore the most promising solution of the piracy problem would be to establish and fund a Somali coastguard. This would enforce both anti-piracy laws and stop illegal fishing off the coast of Somalia, providing new opportunities for economic for Somalia's coastal communities.

This article demonstrates the inconsistent and wavering Soviet attitude towards national liberation movements in general and the Palestinian organizations in particular. Until the late 1960s, the Soviets viewed these organizations with suspicion, hesitating to engage in political dialogue with them. However, in the 1970s, political and military events in the region, as well as modifications in the Kremlin's Cold War strategies, led to a general shift towards the Middle East in Soviet foreign policy. Soviet leaders showed increased willingness to provide certain Palestinian organizations with arms with which to conduct terrorist activities against Israeli, pro-Israeli, Jewish and Western targets. The article explores the complex relations between Palestinian organizations and the USSR in the field of international terror. The study also exposes and analyzes the nature and content of Soviet-Palestinian arms dialogues and transactions. It provides clear evidence that Soviet policymakers and other luminaries were fully informed of, and sometimes directly involved in, these transactions and dialogues at the highest levels.

Aviation had a highly significant role in supporting French military operations in Algeria. This was particularly true of aerial reconnaissance and intelligence gathering. Initially, however, the Air Force effort was handicapped by inappropriate approaches, too few army/air liaison officers and scepticism among army officers aware of the difficulties of earlier air operations against an insurgency in Indochina (1946-54). It also lacked sufficient suitable aircraft types. Gradually, improved aircraft and photographic techniques permitted systematic and detailed aerial mapping and intelligence work, as well as rapid provision of close air support during ground battles. Better integration of air and ground forces, along with more coordinated command and control, arrived from 1959 onwards when an air force general, Maurice Challe, became inter-service commander-in-chief in Algeria. This permitted an authentic and mostly effective combined-airms and joint service approach to the locating, tracking, engagement and destruction of Algerian nationalist bands.

This memoir, written by the captain of the sole Soviet Foxtrot -class submarine sent to the Caribbean during the Cuban Missile crisis that was not forced to surface by the US Navy, offers a first-hand account of the maritime dimensions of the crisis. The author describes the immense obstacles that confronted the Soviet submariners, including equipment poorly adapted for operations in tropical waters, an inability to communicate effectively with Moscow and extremely intense US antisubmarine operations. However, this account also reveals some surprising successes for the Soviet Navy: for example, the allegedly effective exploitation of US Navy communications. Most significant from a historical point of view are the descriptions of circumstances surrounding the last-minute placement of nuclear-tipped torpedoes on board the submarines.

Robert Pape's recent book Dying to Win is one of the most important statistical studies of the global phenomenon of suicide attacks to appear in the recent past. While Pape's basic thesis of the formula of occupation in addition to religious/cultural differences between the occupier and the occupied causing these suicide attacks holds up, there are a number of cases in which it does not. Additionally, some of Pape's historical and Islamic examples are weak. Before proceeding to an over-arching theory of suicide attacks it is important not to ignore the exceptions to Pape's theory.

In modern warfare at and from the sea, logistics are crucially important to the implementation of strategy and conduct of operational campaigns. Between August 1943 and March 1944, a British joint service mission led by Major-General John Lethbridge travelled to North America, the Pacific, and India to study the organisation, equipment, and methods necessary for coming offensive operations against Japan. The British obtained valuable information from the Americans and connected with those countries of the British Empire most directly involved. The Lethbridge Mission's progress and findings informed evolving Admiralty planning for supporting naval forces to be sent to the Indian and Pacific Oceans in pursuance of British wartime strategy.

The article explores the 1950 'Ambassador's Agreement' (named after US Ambassador Lewis Douglas) about establishing long-term US air bases in the UK. During the discussions British representatives expressed resentment of American pressure and were concerned about the expense that developing the bases for American purposes might entail. There were even fears that Washington might use the airfields to launch an atomic bomb attack on the USSR without regard to the views of the UK government. The British consented to providing the bases because they wanted to enmesh the US further in UK and Western European defence. For their part American negotiators had wanted to further US atomic strategy without delay. Although the agreement imposed no restriction on the use of the airfields, some US officials believed that in a crisis the UK government might try to prevent them being used for atomic bombing missions.

This article analyzes the quality of the Egyptian and Israeli intelligence advice and decision-making process in the October 1973 War as key factors that determined its course. Following a background to the subject, we focus on the 9–13 October standstill stage, in which Sadat decided, despite his generals’ advice, to renew the Egyptian offensive. Effective Israeli intelligence collection about the coming attack, which was well used by the decision-makers, saved Israel from accepting an undesired ceasefire. The result was the 14 October failed Egyptian offensive that turned the tide of the war and led to Israeli military achievements at the war’s final stage

This article challenges the widely held belief that that the United States ‘won the war but lost the peace’ following the war with Iraq in 1991. Fears of a resurgent Iraq grew throughout the decade, despite abundant evidence that Iraq was becoming desperately weak and was no longer a threat to regional security. In fact, the United States won the war as well as the peace by any meaningful definition of the term. The article also discusses the reasons why US policymakers and observers convinced themselves that they had lost. The final section considers implications for strategy and policy in wars of limited objectives.

This article draws upon previously unavailable document materials to question views pointing to a degree of stagnation in Japanese maritime thinking. It similarly reviews claims about trends to compensate the decline of national military power with the build-up of projection capabilities. The article’s main argument is that Japanese seapower is not declining. The Japanese Navy is evolving to combine enhanced capabilities to retain sea control in the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea with extended operational reach and flexibility, including an expeditionary component to meet alliance and diplomatic commitments in East Asia and beyond its confines.

One of the central debates in contemporary international relations scholarship concerns the issue of whether balancing has occurred in response to US-based unipolarity, and if it has, how this should be characterised. Existing research has seen analysts argue that major power responses to unipolarity can be placed in one of either three categories: an absence of balancing, soft balancing, and hard balancing. This article contributes to the scholarly literature by providing a case study of hard internal Russian balancing against the US’s development and deployment of Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) systems during the Bush Administration (2001–08). Russian hard balancing against the US has involved: (1) fielding new strategic nuclear and conventional weapons equipped with BMD countermeasures, and, relatedly, (2) making changes in military doctrine. As a result, security dilemma dynamics are increasingly in evidence in US relations with Russia.

There was not, except in the very broadest sense, a unified 'Allied' grand strategy regarding any aspect of World War II. British-American strategy and Soviet strategy were formed in isolation. This was certainly true of the strategy of anti-German insurgency. Aside from geographical and ideological factors a major source of difference was that Britain was at war with Germany from September 1939, while the USSR and the USA became involved two years later. There were major asymmetries: Moscow's insurgency strategy for most of the war was in practice applied to its own national territory, while British (and later American) insurgency strategy was applied to foreign countries occupied by Germany. It will be argued, however, that in different parts of the Grand Alliance the path of insurgency strategy followed a similar trajectory, even if this strategy was not synchronised in time or space. In London, Moscow, and Washington, high hopes were initially placed on popular rebellion in German-occupied territory. It was only months after the entry of their countries into the war that the high commands, both west and east of the Reich, came to the conclusion that insurgent forces could only be used as an auxiliary to huge conventional armies.

Many scholars, strategists and pundits contend that the US is in decline. They argue that America's national capabilities are significantly eroding, and that with the rise of important regional powers, its primacy in world affairs is rapidly diminishing as well. Yet America continues to possess significant advantages in critical sectors such as economic size, technology, competitiveness, demography, force size, power projection, military technology, and in the societal capacity to innovate and adapt. This article argues that the nature of material problems has been overstated, and that the US should be able to withstand modest erosion in its relative strength for some time to come without losing its predominant status. Instead, where limits to American primacy do exist, they are as or more likely to be ideational as they are material. The problem inheres as much or more in elite and societal beliefs, policy choices, and political will, as in economic, technological or manpower limitations at home, or the rise of peer competitors abroad.

Despite all the talk of ‘hearts and minds’ being the key to counterinsurgency, local public opinion is rarely studied and when it is, it often yields surprising conclusions. Through analyzing polling data from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, this article shows that public opinion is less malleable, more of an effect rather than a cause of tactical success, and a poor predictor of strategic victory. As a result, modern counterinsurgency doctrine’s focus on winning popular support may need to be rethought.

Scholars have widely adopted the view that the behaviour of the Tunisian military during the ‘Arab Spring’ constitutes a positive case of military defection. This paper argues that, contrary to this dominant interpretation, the military remained loyal to the authoritarian civilian leadership throughout the protests as it had repeatedly done in the past. Defection occurred, however, within the Police and the National Guard, which are mistakenly portrayed as having been loyal to Ben Ali. The paper shows that scholars have sought to explain exactly the opposite of what actually happened and, thus, it questions their conclusions regarding civil-military relations in Tunisia.

The Pakistan army elicits many concerns about terrorism, nuclear proliferation and the coherence of the state. However, very little is actually known about this institution. This essay mobilizes unique data to address one important facet: the army’s geographical recruitment base. We find that the Pakistan army has been successful at expanding the geographical recruitment base while some groups (namely those who are native to Sindh) remain highly under-represented. We also find that the officer corps is increasingly coming from urban areas. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these important shifts subject to the limitations of our data.

In the 1990s no-fly zones were introduced as a new way to utilize airpower in the context of Peace Support Operations (PSOs). During that time, they were put to use over Iraq and over Bosnia. However, it is unclear to what extent the no-fly zones were successful in those two instances. This article examines the capabilities of no-fly zones and analyzes the Iraq and Bosnia cases of enforcement. It concludes that no-fly zones can be very effective if properly implemented and offers guidance for policy-makers on how to achieve maximum efficacy.

In issue 33/1 of The Journal of Strategic Studies, John Nagl and Brian Burton were provided with the opportunity to respond to the observations we made in our article, 'Whose Hearts and Whose Minds? The Curious Case of Global Counter-Insurgency', which appeared in the same issue. Nagl and Burton's reply, however, did not overtly address the points raised in our article, but instead offered a re-statement of the precepts of classical counter-insurgency (COIN). While we certainly recognise the value of counter-insurgency methods in conflicts such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, Nagl and Burton's reply overlooks our original concerns about the limited utility of neo-counter-insurgency thinking outside these environments and the dangerous political implications it contains. They further ignore our core contention that a narrow preoccupation with theatre-specific technique has profound limitations when offered as a universal panacea to address complex transnational threats.

The common argument that public support for war is casualty sensitive ignores the fact that casualty figures are not revealed automatically. While the military decides when, and to whom, to release such information, political elites can question, even condemn, how the government goes about this business. After briefly exploring how the US military operated during the two world wars, this article focuses on American casualty reporting during the Korean War, arguing that the way the figures were revealed often sparked enormous political controversy, which at two crucial moments helped to undermine domestic support for this distant war.

This article surveys China’s current naval forces and considers key dynamics and possible Chinese naval futures to 2020, the projected end of Beijing’s ‘strategic window of opportunity’, the idea that a peaceful external environment for economic development, globalization, and integration of China into the global economy allows China to benefit from diversion of US attention to countering terrorism. It considers broad possibilities through 2030, the general limit of public US government projections, and by which time multiple factors will likely slow China’s growth and compete for leadership focus and resources.

Entering the twenty-first century, China has demonstrated an assertive foreign policy, not only in employing various types of economic and military leverage but also in conducting the Three Warfares () – psychological warfare, public opinion warfare, and legal warfare. This article attempts to identify the motives and methods of China’s Three Warfares by analyzing its history, logic, and agents. Based on this analysis, the author also presents the position of the Three Warfares in China’s foreign policy and the warfares’ impact on the international security environment involving other major powers and China’s neighbors.

One of the effects of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms is the steady erosion of the ideological integrity of Marxism‐Leninism‐Maoism. To compensate for that erosion, the Chinese Communist Party has turned to patriotic nationalism for a new source of legitimacy. China's new nationalism transcends mere rhetoric but is manifested in the behavior of its armed forces ‐ which makes an understanding of the nationalist ideology of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) important. As revealed in PLA and related military publications, that ideology is a potentially problematic mix of wounded pride, historical resentment, and irredentism.

This article is the first academic study of Egyptian foreign policy towards Israel under Hosni Mubarak (1981–2011). It challenges a deeply entrenched conventional wisdom that Egypt pursued a cold-peace foreign policy towards Israel throughout this period. We demonstrate that Egyptian foreign policy towards Israel was dynamic – comprising cold peace (1981–91), a hybrid foreign policy of cold peace and strategic peace (1991–2003), and a pure strategic peace posture (2003–11). We also use the case of Egyptian foreign policy towards Israel as a heuristic to develop a conception of a new type of peace, strategic peace, as an intermediary analytical category between cold and stable peace.

Michael C. Fowler, Amateur Soldiers, Global Wars: Insurgency and Modern Conflict.Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005. Pp.183. $49.95/£28.99, HB. ISBN 0-275-98136-3. Roger Trinquier, Modern Warfare: A French View on Counterinsurgency, first published in France as La Guerre Moderne (1961), trans. by Daniel Lee, foreword by Bernard Fall, introduction by Eliot Cohen. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006. Pp.95. $74.95/£41.95, HB. ISBN 0-275-99267-5. US$29.95/£16.95, PB. ISBN 0-275-99268-3. David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice first published 1964, foreword by John A. Nagl. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006. Pp.107. $74.95/£41.95, HB. ISBN 0-275-99269-1. $0.00/£0.00, PB ISBN 0-275-99303-5. Richard H. Shultz, Jr. and Andrea J. Dew, Insurgents, Terrorists and Militias – The Warriors of Contemporary Combat. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Pp.316. $29.50/£19, HB. ISBN 0-231-12982-3. Robert M. Cassidy, Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terror: Military Culture and Irregular War. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006. Pp.211. US$49.95/£28.99, HB. ISBN 0-275-98990-9. US Army and US Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency FM 3-24, MCWP 3-33.5 of 15 December 2006. Pp.282 <http://usacac.army.mil/CAC/Repository/Materials/COIN-FM3-24.pdf>.

This article uses a novel database of 1,625 posthumously published biographies of members of two Islamist militant organizations (Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM)), all of whom were killed in the course of carrying out militant attacks. In general, each biography provides data on the militant’s birthplace, education, recruitment, and training. The number of observations in this database is a full order of magnitude larger than those of previous databases assembled from militant biographies. While the sample of militants in this database is the product of multiple selection effects, analysis of the database undermines many common myths about Pakistani militants and casts doubt on current policy approaches to mitigating Islamist militancy in Pakistan.

This article outlines the controversy around the thesis advanced by Terence Zuber that there never was a Schlieffen Plan and that German war planning in 1914, far from having the aggressive edge that historians have attributed to it for decades, was in fact a defensive plan designed to deal with a Franco-Russian attack on Germany. In addition to reviewing the debate precipitated by Zuber’s thesis, this article also takes a closer look at how Germany prepared for war in the years 1906-1914, and particularly how it ended up embarking on that war in August 1914. Such an investigation of German war planning, with particular emphasis on the war plans of the younger Moltke, will serve as a critique of Zuber’s controversial thesis, and it will be shown that while Zuber maintains that there never was a Schlieffen Plan, Schlieffen, Moltke and their contemporaries were certain that such a plan existed. In 1914, Moltke did not shrink from implementing his own version of Schlieffen’s strategic thinking when war broke out.

The war on al-Qaeda and its affiliates appears to be endless but every war must end. Winding down the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq has been difficult, but both were embedded in what was then called the ‘war on terrorism.’ What does ‘success’ in that war mean? With the death of bin Laden and the increase in drone operations, how far is the US from achieving it? Can this war end? The article analyzes the ongoing US response to the 9/11 attacks in historical context, revealing four patterns common to all prolonged wars: means become ends, tactics become strategy, boundaries are blurred, and the search for a perfect peace replaces reality. It concludes by laying out an effective strategy for ending the war.

The following special issue on the role of armed forces focuses on what explains the considerable variation in both how these uprisings played themselves out and their political outcomes. At least three basic dimensions – duration, political intensity and the magnitude of violence – the variation Between the six states covered in this issue – Egypt, Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Yemn and Bahrain – has been considerable even on a proportionate basis. The range of political outcomes within these six cases has been considerable, ranging from a more or less stable transition to democracy in Tunisia to the Syrian case where there is considerable fear that Syria will break up into sectarian mini-states.

This article examines the initial Western response to the Arab Spring. Traditional interests – oil, counterterrorism, containing Iran, and the security of Israel – offer only a limited explanation. Domestic politics and a humanitarian agenda explain some variation, but they too are insufficient. A number of leaders appeared to believe change would happen no matter what, so it was often better to embrace it than fight it. Others desired to showcase a new model, where the United States would not necessarily lead. Western powers also recognized the limits of their power and desired to maintain alliances with conservative countries like Saudi Arabia.

Although seen by many as an unequivocal supporter of Gaddafi's power basis, the Libyan military's reaction to the 2011 uprising was far from unified: plagued by desertion as well as disintegration, the regime managed to rely only on the hard core of its armed forces. This was mostly a result of the regime's decade-long coup-proofing measures which rendered it in large parts militarily useless. Weakened at the micro level, the Libyan military was incapable of acting at the macro level in any meaningful way. Sitting at the analytical intersection between internal and external features of the armed forces, the Libyan case provides useful insights on the study of the armed forces.

This article (Now OPEN ACCESS) – based on data that employs interviews conducted with British Army personnel – adopts a social theory of learning in order to examine how both formal and informal learning systems have affected organizational learning within the Army in relation to the counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan. It argues that while the Army has adopted new, or reformed existing, formal learning systems, these have not generated a reconceptualization of how to conduct counter-insurgency warfare. It, furthermore, argues that while informal learning systems have enabled units to improve their pre-deployment preparations, these have created adaptation traps that have acted as barriers to higher-level learning.

India has increasingly high aspirations in the Indian Ocean, as enunciated by politicians, naval figures and the wider elite. These aspirations, its strategic discourse, are of pre-eminence and leadership. India's maritime strategy for such a self-confessed diplomatic, constabulary and benign role is primarily naval-focused; a sixfold strategy of increasing its naval spending, strengthening its infrastructure, increasing its naval capabilities, active maritime diplomacy, exercising in the Indian Ocean and keeping open the choke points. Through such strategy, and soft balancing with the United States, India hopes to secure its own position against a perceived growing Chinese challenge in the Indian Ocean.

The Bahraini security forces fulfilled their task of defending the regime without any qualms during the uprising that occurred in February and March 2011. The regime's coup-proofing strategy has been efficient. It is notably based on the exclusion of the Shias from the security apparatus in a country where the ruling dynasty comes from the Sunni minority and where the opposition is dominated by Shia Islamic movements. However, the recruitment pattern of the Bahraini security forces also results from the general civil-military relations characteristic of all the Gulf states. The increasingly tense factionalism inside the regime is likely to have an impact on the security forces.

This article is a response to Evron's argument, offering readers another perspective to assess China's military modernization and war fighting capabilities, using the same framework and methodology. It examines three topics: China's national security and military strategy, the PLA's procurement decision-making process, and China's military support and mobilization system. It concludes that, China's military modernization is to fight and win local wars under the conditions of informatization, but if required the PLA can reliably supply large numbers of sophisticated weapons and spare parts, to wage a complex and prolonged conflict.

Saleh's solution to ‘the civil-military problematic’ (to borrow Peter Feaver's phrase) was to build powerful praetorian units and place his relatives in command of them, a counter-productive approach that ultimately increased the risk that Saleh faced. During Yemen's Arab Spring uprisings, sections of the armed forces not controlled by President Ali Abd'allah Saleh's siblings and cousins sought to ride the wave of popular revolt and emerge as a cohesive power-base in the post-Saleh period. To achieve these aims the military establishment made a conscious effort to let the tribes and civil society activists lead the assault on the Saleh government.

This essay addresses the debate on the expansion of the concept of security, which emerged especially after the end of the Cold War. My argument is based on a distinction between the phenomenon to be explained and the explanations, which include all the relevant competing causal factors affecting the explained phenomenon. The subject matter, that the security field addresses, is the threat of organized inter-group violence, and the ways to manage and to prevent it. Here a somewhat broadened version of the traditionalist security concept is in order, which should treat peace as a central element of the field alongside war. Yet, regarding the competing explanations of war and peace, the door should be kept wide open to a great variety of causal factors, theories and explanations, on the condition that they logically and empirically affect war and peace.

This article challenges traditional dualist thinking concerning the balancing of counter-insurgency tactics against a commitment to human rights. It argues that, far from being forces which weigh against each other, they can be made to pull in the same direction, for the betterment of society as a whole. The article goes on to consider particular counter-insurgency practices used in Northern Ireland and maintains that they did not take proper account of human rights, thereby prolonging rather than shortening the conflict. The courts, even in Strasbourg, were slow to protect human rights in line with developing international standards on accountability.

The question of whether or not cyber war amounts to war per se is difficult to determine given strategic theory's uncertain grasp of the concepts of force, violence and lethality. These three concepts, along with their relationships with one another, are explored in order to demonstrate that cyber attacks can in fact be construed as acts of war.

This article develops a systemic theory of security environment and explores the theory's implication for managing security. The central theme here is to argue that becuase security environment is a system, a systemic approach, not the conventional approach by identifying threats, is the way to go for understanding security environment and making strategy. The article first identifies the factors shaping security environment and elaborates on how the factors interact to shape the security environment. After offering several tests for the theory, the article concludes by laying out the theory's implication for understanding security and managing security.