Suchergebnisse

Thanks, John Kelly! Today, I got into a twitter argument with Dan Gardner, who I respect a lot.  He was making a claim about the next Trump administration being worse than the first one, which is something I readily agree, but asserted that the first batch of appointees restrained Trump.  I scoff at that as I documented here quite often that his first batch included many arsonists and incompetents.  I brought up John Kelly who was a xenophobe in charge of Homeland Security.  Gardner responded that Kelly was highly accomplished when he was appointed.  Which caused the conversation to turn: how was Kelly highly accomplished?Kelly was a retired three star marine general.  And?  To me, that means he had the qualities that the Marines desired.  Because of a number of awful folks getting promoted to the top of various military hierarchies, I can't say that because a dude has a bunch of stars or leafs on their shoulders that they have done great things.  Tommy Franks was great at sucking up and kicking down and got four stars along the way, and then mismanaged Central Command, helping to birth the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I would have swerved off the highway on the way out to California when we passed the Tommy Franks Institute for Leadership if my daughter was not the one behind the wheel.  Yesterday, I gave a talk at the Canadian Club of Kingston, and I ran through some of the senior officers in the CAF who rose despite (or because of) their abuse of power and sexual misconduct.  Art McDonald might have been good at driving a ship, but commanding the CAF?  He showed his incompetence in so many ways but most obviously by sending an email to the entire community of senior officers telling them that he was coming back after being "exonerated," etc.  So, my first point was simply that the promotion processes are far from perfect so accomplishing high rank does not mean as much as one might think.  My second point is that whatever they were good at to get promoted in the military did not mean they had the skills to operate on the civilian side of government.  There is a critical contradiction or irony at play here.  One of the key widely shared characteristics of contemporary military officers in many democracies is that they define themselves as the only professionals in military matters--that they have expertise on the management of violence and such expertise civilians know not (thanks to Sam Huntington).  Indeed, this can lead to contempt for civilians who "interfere" as those who are not "professionals" are amateurs.  The contradiction is that these same military officers, when they retire, often think they can serve in civilian roles without any significant training despite lacking expertise.  These military officers are often far more amateurish in civilian capacities than those civilians working in defence agencies.  Running through the list of senior officers who served under Trump: which ones covered themselves in glory and competence?  Kelly? Mattis? McMaster?  Flynn (the shortest serving National Security Adviser)?  Another contradiction is at work.  Military officers, thanks again to Sam Huntington, think that they are apolitical.  This can mean many things, but militaries are hardly apolitical and working within any large organization requires politics.  But they are trained not to think politically, a paradox of professionalism, despite the fact, you know, war is the continuation of politics by other means. So, dumped into a civilian spot, they need to be sensitive to the politics of their job and of their agency.  Which they are often not.Finally, for cabinet-style governments, where there is some collective decision-making, the decision-makers should not be retired senior officers.  I have written about the mistake of making retired officers SecDef or MinDef.  I am not alone in arguing that retired senior military officers are unfit for being the top civilian in the chain of command as they are not really civilian--they have military mindset and they are embedded in military networks.  What is true for the head of the defense agency (department/ministry/whatever) is somewhat less true but still applicable for other cabinet officials when there is collective decision-making.Some will say: hey, you need military expertise.  The answer to that is that there are plenty of military folks to ask for advice.  Indeed, democracies tend to have specific folks designated as the senior person responsible for providing military advice--the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of the Defence Staff, etc.  Some will say: hey, Ike was a former general, Marshall was a former general, etc.  And the answer is: sure, they were incredibly exceptional people.  Ike, as Supreme Commander of the European theatre had to engage in much politics to manage the competing American generals like Patton, not to mention foreign generals like Montgomery and De Gaulle and civilians like Churchill.  Marshall's experiences managing the US Army during the war gave him a sense of strategy and of politics so that he could be a pretty terrific Secretary of State.  Those individuals did not just earn stars on their shoulders but performed amazingly well in difficult circumstances heavily laden with politics, and they were self-aware as they engaged in politics.  Does that describe Tommy Franks or Wesley Clark or Art McDonald?  Hardly.To be fair, I don't think that all military officers, retired or active, are as flawed as these folks.  I just don't think that military service and promotion to the highest ranks are signals that someone is going to be a great cabinet secretary.  It may be unfair to use the retired/active folks who served under Trump because that was such a shitshow.  But perhaps only a shitshow would focus more on stars on shoulders than real qualifications for the job at hand?  I have the same attitude here as I do towards term limits--I prefer to have experts in important positions, not rookies.  Would you like to be the first patient for a brand new surgeon or dentist or the first client for a brand new lawyer?  Retired military officers would have to learn the job while on the job--and that is not good when the stakes are high.

This paper studies the relations between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union in history to evaluate the importance of Afghanistan for the USSR and the Soviet decision to intervene military in 1979. (DÜI-Gbh)

Colombian-Americans are people of Colombian descent (both immigrants and native born) who reside in the United States. Colombian immigrants were some of the first South Americans to settle in the United States (likely around the mid-19th century), and in the early 21st century, they make up the largest immigrant population from South America (about one million). The first identifiable Colombian immigrant communities were established in New York City after World War I. New York City and Miami have had the largest Colombian populations—following the general trend of South American migrants to reside mostly on the East Coast. Studies have examined the experience of Colombian-Americans dealing with the effects of demographic characteristics, immigration, the stigma of drug trafficking, levels of assimilation and acculturation, settlement locales, politics and political participation, language, US-Colombian relations, and culture. Although Colombian-Americans are the largest South American ethnic group in the United States, and are unique in many respects, studies often lump them under the "Latino" or "Hispanic" label, include them among a number of other groups, or exclude them altogether. This cursory treatment, in terms of broad categorization, is not unique to Colombian-Americans (most Latino-origin groups are labeled this way), but it does make it more difficult to disentangle the literature that may apply to or that examines this particular group.

Reports on the activism of American Jewish organizations in support of Israel's military operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as a less overt concern among American Jews in response to what some see as Israel's disproportionate use of force against Lebanese civilians.

Discusses possibilities and ramifications of Germany assuming a major role in world politics, commensurate with its economic and military position.

Britain's withdrawal from the European Union raises questions on how UK defence policy will develop. Significant shifts inside the United Kingdom as well as its changing position in the international arena caused by Brexit require new approaches in its military strategy. National Security Strategy 2015 and UK's International Defence Engagement Strategy 2017 do not fully reflect current geopolitical realities while new strategic documents haven't been presented so far. UK armed forces modernization is becoming even more relevant, however there are few signs that London has capabilities to increase its defence budget. The latest statistics shows stable decline in UK military expenditure as percentage of GDP. The armed forces have been shrinking in size for several decades and some large modernization projects have come across considerable difficulties. After years of heated debates an ambitious plan to replace all four ballistic missile submarines with the new ones has been approved. However Brexit caused another wave of claims for Scottish independence raising concerns over the future of the Britain's only Scotland-based naval facility for nuclear forces. Brexit inevitably poses a dilemma of setting UK's foreign and defence policy priorities. Though leaving the EU doesn't mean that Britain will fully withdraw from European defence and security initiatives, active cooperation in this sphere between London and Brussels is highly unlikely. Given that, the importance of NATO as well as other multilateral security mechanisms (especially the UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force with Scandinavian and Baltic states) and bilateral defence cooperation (particularly with the US and France) is significantly increasing. Despite numerous challenges for British defence and security policy caused by Brexit these difficulties together with the UK's traditional strong points such as the special relationship with the US and network of military facilities around the globe may give impetus to a more proactive military strategy aimed at strengthening UK's global influence.

"Author paints a portrait of an evolving American police state as police authority expands into extensions of the military, and government's intrusions undermine basic freedoms guaranteed to American citizens under the Constitution, turning Americans into enemy combatants who are spied upon, raided, manhandled, silenced, locked up, shot at, and denied due process of the law"--

For over 350 years, Egypt was the largest province of the Ottoman Empire, which had captured it from the Mamluk sultanate in 1517. It is well known that the Ottomans retained key Mamluk usages, above all in subprovincial administration, and that a number of the defeated Mamluks who were willing to cooperate with the new regime were allowed to join the Ottoman administration. In consequence, a number of practices of the Mamluk sultanate survived the Ottoman conquest. Critical administrative offices such as those of pilgrimage commander (amīr al-ḥajj), treasurer (daftardār), and deliverer of the annual tribute to Istanbul (khaznadār) were analogous to offices of the Mamluk sultanate, and the grandees whom the Ottomans installed in these offices were analogous to the Mamluk amirs of the sultanate. Above all, the practice of recruiting boys and young men from the Caucasus as military slaves, or mamluks, and training them as soldiers in households geared to that purpose appears not only to have survived but to have flourished in Ottoman Egypt. By the time of Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798, in fact, the province's military elite was dominated by Caucasian, and above all Georgian, mamluks. In the face of such apparent similarities with the Mamluk sultanate, it is tempting to define the military society of Ottoman Egypt as a continuation or revival of the sultanate.

Tehran's military capabilities do not match its ambitions for recognition and status. It iscautious, defensive and prudent in resorting to force, due as much to experience as torealism about its own limits. (Survival / SWP)

A MILITARY CULTURE IS A COLLECTION OF IDEAS, BELIEFS, PREJUDICES AND PERCEPTIONS WHICH DETERMINE AN ARMY'S RESPONSE TO THE TASKS WHICH IS SET BY A POLITICAL AUTHORITY. MOREOVER, IT GOVERNS THE INTERNAL CONDITIONS WHICH GIVE A DISTINCT CHARACTER TO A MILITARY ORGANISM, AND DETERMINES THE MANNER AND FORM IN WHICH MILITARY OPERATIONS ARE CARRIED OUT. THIS ARTICLE IDENTIFIES TWO DISTINCT MILITARY CULTURES: ATTRITIONAL AND MOBILE. THE ATTRITIONAL CULTURE EMPHASIZES THE COMBAT POWER OF TACTICAL UNITS; WAR-FIGHTING AT ALL LEVELS OF DECISION; SEIZURE AND RETENTION OF GROUND AS THE KEY MEASURE OF SUCCESS OR FAILURE; AND AN EMPHASIS ON "THE PLAN." THE MOBILE CULTURE IS CHARACTERIZED BY THE BELIEF THAT THE ENEMY IS NOT BEATEN INTO SUBMISSION BY SUPERIOR RESOURCES CARRYING OUT ACTIONS AGAINST THE STRENGTH OF THE ENEMY FORCES, BUT ATTACKS WHERE THE ENEMY IS PHYSICALLY AND PSYCHOLOGICALLY WEAKEST.

Although the issues of military studies are increasingly analysed in the framework of political science, the representatives of international relations and military studies use different ways of interpreting military power – one of the key aspects of military studies. With the intention of expanding the possibilities of applying theories of international relations to military studies, this article aims to show the need for a synthesis of theoretical insights into neoclassical realism and military studies for scientific interpretation and research of the military power structure. The inducement of inter-paradigmatic debates by revealing and comparing military power explanation methods reflects a theoretical attempt to expand the possibilities for the application of international relations theories on warfare studies. Although the application of neoclassical realism theory to the explanation of military power is not new, this study explores broader possibilities of the application of this theory. The study substantiates the influence of non-material resources and unit-level variables on the structure of military power while making the assumption that neoclassical realism creates conditions to reveal the process of military power conversion but not the content of military power