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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > Defence strategy, planning & research > General
The issue of security in the Gulf has an importance which goes far beyond the regional location of the area. It is enough to note that instability in the area may result in the interruption of oil supplies to the rest of the world. This book, first published in 1981, considers some of the challenges facing the region following recent developments such as the fall of the Shah and the proclamation of the Islamic Republic in Iran, the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, the formation of an American task force to intervene in the area, the failure of the Camp David agreement and the Iran-Iraq war.
This book provides a critical understanding of the emerging role of African militaries in peacetime democratic Africa.
This is a handbook of tactics based on the ancient Chinese military classics. This unique work draws on over two thousand years of experience of warfare to present a distillation of a hundred key strategic principles applicable to modern life, including business and human relations.
This edited volume explores and analyses strategic thinking, military reform and adaptation in an era of Asian growth, European austerity and US rebalancing. A significant shift in policy, strategy and military affairs is underway in both Asia and Europe, with the former gaining increasing prominence in the domain of global security. At the same time, the world's powers are now faced with an array of diverse challenges. The resurgence of great power politics in both Europe and Asia, along with the long term threats of terrorism, piracy and sustained geopolitical instability has placed great strain on militaries and security institutions operating with constrained budgets and wary public support. The volume covers a wide range of case studies, including the transformation of China's military in the 21st century, the internal and external challenges facing India, Russia's military modernization program and the USA's reassessment of its strategic interests. In doing so, the book provides the reader with the opportunity to conceptualize how strategic thinking, military reform, operational adaptation and technological integration have interacted with the challenges outlined above. With contributions by leading scholars and practitioners from Europe and Asia, this book provides a valuable contribution to the understanding of strategic and operational thinking and adjustment across the world. This book will be of much interest to students of military and strategic studies, security studies, defence studies, Asian politics, Russian politics, US foreign policy and IR in general.
This timely study examines the forces at play in one of the world's most explosive nations, helping readers understand why Syria's popular uprising has been the most violent and hard-fought in the Middle East. In this insightful work, a noted expert goes behind the headlines to examine the complexities of Syrian politics and their impact on the modern world. Beginning with an overview of political and economic change after 1963 when the Ba'th Party came to power, the book focuses on developments in Syria since Bashar al-Assad assumed the presidency in 2000. It probes the evolution of the Islamist opposition and the course of the popular uprising that broke out in 2011 and explores Syria's multilayered relations with Israel, Turkey, Iran, Russia, and the United States. Readers will learn why rebellion in Syria has taken a much different path than movements that overturned autocratic regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen. They will also come away with a more nuanced understanding of the pivotal role Syria plays in both the Arab-Israeli conflict and inter-Arab relations, as well as the confluence of domestic challenges and foreign threats that make Syria the most vulnerable state in the contemporary Middle East.
One of the most significant factors for contemporary international relations is the growth of China's economic, military, and political power. Indeed, few analysts would dispute the observation that China's power has strongly influenced the structure of the international system, major-power strategic relations, international security, the patterns of trans-border economic activities, and most importantly, the political and security dynamics in Asia in the twenty-first century. This book maps the growth of China's political, economic, and military capabilities and its impact on the security order in Asia over the coming decades. While updating the emerging power dimensions and prevailing discourse, it provides a nuanced analysis of whether the growth of Chinese power is resulting in Beijing becoming more assertive, or even aggressive, in its behavior and pursuit of national interests. It also examines how the key Asian countries perceive and react to the growth of China's power and how US rebalancing would play out in the context of Beijing's political, economic, and military power. China's Power and Asian Security will be of huge interest to student and scholars of Asian politics, Chinese politics, security studies and international security and international relations more generally.
This volume examines the connection between culture and defence by providing an inside look at Brazil's aerospace strategies. Brazil is becoming increasingly important geopolitically, and several studies have sought to further understanding of this new position in the international arena. This volume aims to provide a better understanding of the Brazilian nation, its security dilemmas, and how the country seeks to develop its defence training process and improve its professional military education. Organised into two parts, the chapters offer academic dialogues on several aspects of this topic, including public politics and the law, joint operations, human factors and the government interchanges with industry. The first section analyses Brazilian defence policy and strategy, discussing different aspects of aerospace power and Brazilian security perspectives. Chapters discuss the relationship between Brazil and the United States, which blend aspects of the generation of knowledge, science, technology and innovation, and point to economic issues and the Defence Industrial Base. Specific implications of the Brazilian air space, compared with Europe and the United States, also are exposed. In addition, a vision of cyberspace implications for the national power, a present-day question for the entire planet, is also presented. Thereafter, the second section looks at specific aspects of professional military education and explains the Brazilian approach to strengthening its aerospace power. This includes military education and performance, interdisciplinary studies, working jointly, multivariate analysis and cases. This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, defence studies, gender issues, crises management and decision making, Latin American politics and International Relations in general.
The world was standing at the crossroads in 2015 as globalization propelled human beings into an increasingly integrated community of common destiny. In the meantime, the world witnessed the strategic competition among major powers. This annual publication offers views, opinions and predictions on global political and security issues, and China's strategic choices by Chinese scholars. It covers almost all the significant issues that took place in the international security arena in 2015. Besides the relations among major powers, it studies the international community's fight against Islamic State (IS), the strategic situation in the Korean Peninsula, political situation in Myanmar, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on the Iranian nuclear issue, free navigation in the South China Sea, China's Belt and Road Initiative and its grand diplomacy.This book argues that the strategic competition among major powers is heightening, and smaller countries as well as extremist forces like the IS are seeking strategic space by taking advantage of the conflicts among major powers. The book concludes that to address this major historic challenge in international politics, it is essential that some major powers drop the hostile stance towards each other and enhance partnership to foster international cooperation.
The world was standing at the crossroads in 2015 as globalization propelled human beings into an increasingly integrated community of common destiny. In the meantime, the world witnessed the strategic competition among major powers. This annual publication offers views, opinions and predictions on global political and security issues, and China's strategic choices by Chinese scholars. It covers almost all the significant issues that took place in the international security arena in 2015. Besides the relations among major powers, it studies the international community's fight against Islamic State (IS), the strategic situation in the Korean Peninsula, political situation in Myanmar, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on the Iranian nuclear issue, free navigation in the South China Sea, China's Belt and Road Initiative and its grand diplomacy.This book argues that the strategic competition among major powers is heightening, and smaller countries as well as extremist forces like the IS are seeking strategic space by taking advantage of the conflicts among major powers. The book concludes that to address this major historic challenge in international politics, it is essential that some major powers drop the hostile stance towards each other and enhance partnership to foster international cooperation.
In this volume, Fredrick Lister examines security confederations of the modern eras; America's confederal union during the winning of the Revolutionary War; Switzerland's in post-Napoleonic Europe; and Germany's during the turbulence of the Austro-Prussian Confrontation whose outcome transformed the European political scene. Lister concludes with an evaluation of the possibility that confederal-type ties might one day serve as a basis for global union. After setting forth the nature of confederal-type governance, Lister provides three case studies that follow on the evolution of confederal political institutions in the United States, Switzerland, and Germany. Each section ends with a series of conclusions on the confederation examined. A thorough examination of a long-neglected subject that will be of interest to scholars, students, and researchers involved with world government and international relations.
This book, now available in paperback, traces the key evolutions in the development of the concept of human security, the various definitions and critiques, how it relates to other concepts, and what it implies for polities, politics, and policy. Human security is an important subject for the whole world, in particular Asia, as it deals with interactions among fields of social change, such as development, conflict resolution, human rights, and humanitarian assistance. In a globalizing world, in which threats become trans-national and states lose power, security can no longer be studied in a one-dimensional fashion. Written by authors who are experts in this field and with case studies from different regions (Afghanistan, Central Asia and South Asia) presented throughout, this book - now available in paperback - contributes to this new multidimensional conception of security, analyzes its strengths and weaknesses, and focuses on its implications for analysis and action.
The decision to go to war in Iraq has had historic repercussions throughout the world. The editors of this volume bring together scholarly analysis of the decision-making in the U.S and U.K. that led to the war, inside accounts of CIA decision-making, and key speeches and documents related to going to war. The book presents a fascinating case study of decision-making at the highest levels in the United States and Britain as their leaders planned to go to war in Iraq. Just as the Cuban Missile Crisis has been used for decades as a case study in good decision-making, the decision to go to war in Iraq will be analysed for years to come for lessons about what can go wrong in decisions about war. The book presents a fascinating and truly comparative perspective on how President Bush and Prime Minister Blair took their countries to war in Iraq. Each had to convince his legislature and public that war was necessary, and both used intelligence in questionable ways to do so. This book brings together some of the best scholarship and most relevant documents on these important decisions that will reverberate for decades to come. -- .
Since the early 1990s, there has been a clear evolution in the military dimension of Japanese diplomacy. From Gulf War I in 1991 to the present day, an incremental but unmistakable acceptance of, and resort to, military dispatches has taken place, and yet crucially, Japan has not morphed into a traditional military power. Exploring Japan's involvement in both Afghanistan and Iraq, this book examines the evolution and nature of the new civil-military dimension in Japanese foreign policy. It shows how foreign aid, Japan's traditional non-military diplomatic tool, was merged with the operations of the Japanese Self-Defense Force in Iraq and the activities of NATO-ISAF forces in Afghanistan, and emphasises the centrality of civilian power to Japanese foreign policy and diplomacy. However, Dennis Yasutomo argues that while a new civil-military security culture is replacing the old merchant state culture of pacifism and anti-militarism, Japan does not yet qualify as a military "normal nation". Further, the book's exploration of the increased utilization of military power within the context of civilian objectives and non-military diplomatic instruments, sheds light on the current build-up of Japanese military power in East and Southeast Asia amid territorial disputes and nuclear threats, and highlights the impact that Japan's new civil-military diplomacy may have on wider international affairs in the 21st Century. Drawing on interviews with key actors in Tokyo, as well as with practitioners who have served on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, this book will have broad appeal to students and scholars working on Japanese politics and diplomacy, military and security studies and international relations.
The book The APPSMO Advantage: Strategic Opportunities is on the Asia Pacific Programme for Senior Military Officers (APPSMO). APPSMO is a series of conferences organised by the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and its predecessor, the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, for senior military officers of Singapore and other countries of the Asia Pacific, consisting of an intensive week-long programme of lectures, forums, and discussion groups. Very senior speakers share their views on strategic matters, and defence and military issues. The programme brings together key people whose fingers are on the trigger to enable them to communicate with each other directly and informally, thereby enhancing networking among their defence forces, while benefitting from contacts and exchanges between the scholarly and policy communities.
Discover the spiritually incisive strategies for peacefully resolving conflict in this masterpiece of military strategy. Written 2,500 years ago by Chinese general Sun Tzu, The Art of War is a poetic and potent treatise on military strategy still in use in war colleges around the world. Yet its principles transcend warfare and have practical applications to all the conflicts and crises we face in our lives—in our workplaces, our families, even within ourselves. Thomas Huynh guides you through Sun Tzu's masterwork, highlighting principles that encourage a perceptive and spiritual approach to conflict, enabling you to: Prevent conflicts before they arise Peacefully and quickly resolve conflicts when they do arise Act with courage, intelligence and benevolence in adversarial situations Convert potential enemies into friends Control your emotions before they control you Now you can experience the effectiveness of Sun Tzu's teachings even if you have no previous knowledge of The Art of War. Insightful yet unobtrusive facing-page commentary explains the subtleties of the text, allowing you to unlock the power of its teachings and help prevent and resolve the conflicts in your own life.
Sun Tzu, author of 'The Art of War', believed that the acme of leadership consists in figuring out how to subdue the enemy with the least amount of fighting-a fact that America's Founders also understood, and practiced with astonishing success. For it to work, however, a people must possess both the ability and the willingness to use all available instruments of power in peace as much as in war. US foreign policy has increasingly neglected the instruments of civilian power and become overly dependent on lethal solutions to conflict. The steep rise in unconventional conflict has increased the need for diplomatic and other non-hard power tools of statecraft. The United States can no longer afford to sit on the proverbial three-legged national security stool ("military, diplomacy, development"), where one leg is a lot longer than either of the other two, almost forgetting altogether the fourth leg-information, especially strategic communication and public diplomacy. The United States isn't so much becoming militarized as DE civilianized. According to Sun Tzu, self-knowledge is as important as knowledge of one's enemy: "if you know neither yourself nor the enemy, you will succumb in every battle." Alarmingly, the United States is deficient on both counts. And though we can stand to lose a few battles, the stakes of losing the war itself in this age of nuclear proliferation are too high to contemplate.
Sun Tzu, author of 'The Art of War', believed that the acme of leadership consists in figuring out how to subdue the enemy with the least amount of fighting-a fact that America's Founders also understood, and practiced with astonishing success. For it to work, however, a people must possess both the ability and the willingness to use all available instruments of power in peace as much as in war. US foreign policy has increasingly neglected the instruments of civilian power and become overly dependent on lethal solutions to conflict. The steep rise in unconventional conflict has increased the need for diplomatic and other non-hard power tools of statecraft. The United States can no longer afford to sit on the proverbial three-legged national security stool ("military, diplomacy, development"), where one leg is a lot longer than either of the other two, almost forgetting altogether the fourth leg-information, especially strategic communication and public diplomacy. The United States isn't so much becoming militarized as DE civilianized. According to Sun Tzu, self-knowledge is as important as knowledge of one's enemy: "if you know neither yourself nor the enemy, you will succumb in every battle." Alarmingly, the United States is deficient on both counts. And though we can stand to lose a few battles, the stakes of losing the war itself in this age of nuclear proliferation are too high to contemplate.
How should NATO's military strategy and force posture in Western Europe be handled given today's changing relations between East and West? Five relatively senior U.S. military officers spent a year exploring this issue as National Security Fellows at the Kennedy School of Harvard University. "The Future of NATO" serves as a reference based upon their analyses of the changes in the Soviet security posture and the political response of Western Europe to the collapse of the Warsaw pact. It is an analytical tool that deals with the requirements that any new NATO strategy will have to meet to be relevant. It is a catalyst for discussion based on the proposal to replace forward defense strategy with resilient defense. Resilient defense articulates one way in which the United States and NATO can accommodate the pressures for reduced defense spending in the face of a reduced military threat. Resilient defense is evolutionary rather than revolutionary in nature. It takes advantage of increased warning time to permit a strategy that draws heavily on existing mobilization capabilities. The strategy assumes cuts in active forces, yet it is designed to maintain a conventional defense capability across even deeper cuts by making more efficient use of lower levels of forces. This volume deals with more than just the political elements of the NATO alliance or details of military strategies. It also studies the interrelationship among political, economic, and military requirements underpinning Alliance security. Those concerned with military strategy and international security affairs will find this work timely and relevant.
Effective Surveillance for Homeland Security: Balancing Technology and Social Issues provides a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art methods and tools for the surveillance and protection of citizens and critical infrastructures against natural and deliberate threats. Focusing on current technological challenges involving multi-disciplinary problem analysis and systems engineering approaches, it provides an overview of the most relevant aspects of surveillance systems in the framework of homeland security. Addressing both advanced surveillance technologies and the related socio-ethical issues, the book consists of 21 chapters written by international experts from the various sectors of homeland security. Part I, Surveillance and Society, focuses on the societal dimension of surveillance-stressing the importance of societal acceptability as a precondition to any surveillance system. Part II, Physical and Cyber Surveillance, presents advanced technologies for surveillance. It considers developing technologies that are part of a framework whose aim is to move from a simple collection and storage of information toward proactive systems that are able to fuse several information sources to detect relevant events in their early incipient phase. Part III, Technologies for Homeland Security, considers relevant applications of surveillance systems in the framework of homeland security. It presents real-world case studies of how innovative technologies can be used to effectively improve the security of sensitive areas without violating the rights of the people involved. Examining cutting-edge research topics, the book provides you with a comprehensive understanding of the technological, legislative, organizational, and management issues related to surveillance. With a specific focus on privacy, it presents innovative solutions to many of the issues that remain in the quest to balance security with the preservation of privacy that society demands.
This book provides a framework for analysing the interplay between securitisation and foreign affairs, reconnecting critical security studies with traditional IR concerns about interstate relations. What happens to foreign policymaking when actors, things or processes are presented as threats? This book explains state behaviour on the basis of a reflexive framework of insecurity politics, and argues that governments act on the knowledge of international danger available in their societies, but that such knowledge is organised by markedly varying ideas of who threatens whom and how. The book develops this argument and illustrates it by means of various European case studies. Moving across European history and space, these case studies show how securitisation has projected evolving and often contested local ideas of the organisation of international insecurity, and how such knowledges of world politics have then conditioned foreign policymaking on their own terms. With its focus on insecurity politics, the book provides new perspectives for the study of international security. Moving the discipline from systemic theorising to a theory of international systematisation, it shows how world politics is, in practice, often conceived in a different way than that assumed by IR theory. By the same token, by depicting national insecurity as a matter of political construction, the book also raises the challenging question of whether certain projections of insecurity may be considered more warranted than others. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, European politics, foreign policy and IR, in general.
First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Uniting the best of Michael Fagel and Jennifer Hesterman's books in the fields of homeland security and emergency management, the editors of this volume present the prevailing issues affecting the homeland security community today. Many natural and man-made threats can impact our communities-but these well-known and highly respected authors create order from fear, guiding the reader through risk assessment, mitigation strategies, community EOC planning, and hardening measures based upon real-life examples, case studies, and current research in the practice. As terrorist attacks and natural disasters continue to rock the world, Soft Targets and Crisis Management emphasizes the vulnerability of soft targets like schools, churches, and hospitals, and presents the methodology necessary to respond and recover in the event of a crisis in those arenas. Features: Based on ASIS award-winning texts Provides a multi-faceted look at crisis management principles Offers community-specific examples for diverse locales and threat centers Includes up-to-date case studies on soft target attacks from around the world A must-read for security, emergency management, and criminal justice professionals, Soft Targets and Crisis Management: What Emergency Planners and Security Professionals Need to Know is a crucial text for practitioners seeking to make the world a safer place for others.
EU security governance assesses the effectiveness of the EU as a security actor. The book has two distinct features. Firstly, it is the first systematic study of the different economic, political and military instruments employed by the EU in the performance of four different security functions. The book demonstrates that the EU has emerged as an important security actor, not only in the non-traditional areas of security, but increasingly as an entity with force projection capabilities. Secondly, the book represents an important step towards redressing conceptual gaps in the study of security governance, particularly as it pertains to the European Union. The book links the challenges of governing Europe's security to the changing nature of the state, the evolutionary expansion of the security agenda, and the growing obsolescence of the traditional forms and concepts of security cooperation. -- .
Terrorism is often mistakenly thought of as a modern phenomenon, but it goes back quite some time. A History of Terrorism charts the history of political terror from nineteenth-century Europe to the multinational operations of Arab and other groups today. The question is: What is its true impact today and in the future? Laqueur addresses long-neglected psychological issues concerning the origins of and motivations behind terrorism, and examines the sociology of terrorism in depth: funding, intelligence gathering, weapons and tactics, informers and countermeasures, and the crucial role of the media depiction of the "terrorist personality". Systematic terrorism and current interpretations of terrorism, its common patterns, motives, and aims, are unflinchingly faced and clearly explicated. Laqueur ultimately considers the effectiveness of terrorism and examines the ominous possibility of nuclear blackmail. Originally published in 1977, this book is one of the two most quoted works on terrorism. This expanded edition features a new preface and important contributions by distinguished security expert Bruce Hoffman that apply Laqueur's classic and seemingly timeless work to contemporary terrorism issues. |
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