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Lider, J. Towards a Modem Concept of Strategy. Cooperation and Conflict, XVI, 1981, 217-235. Strategy is the key concept in the study of military affairs. The scope of this study depends on the answer to the question how strategy should be interpreted. Should this concept be confined to the most effective way of fighting or should it be extended to include methods of using military force in peacetime? Has the strategy of winning wars to be complemented by the strategy of effective military pressure and coercion and by the strategy of war prevention? Does 'strategy' mean theory, action, or both? This article attempts to discuss the problem in a concise form. First, the extension of the traditional concept of strategy is described. Then some Marxist-Leninist contributions to the analysis of strategy are characterized. The article closes with comments on the modem concept of strategy.

Lider, J. Introduction to Military Theory. Cooperation and Conflict, XV, 1980, 151-168. This article is an introduction to a comprehensive study on the concept of military theory, its scope, structure, and main problems. The author assumes that military theory should and could be treated as a scientific discipline and uses the term 'theory' as including both the study of military affairs and its findings in a generalized form. Military theory answers three questions: What is war and military force; how is military force successfully to be used; and how should one prepare military force for such a successful use. An interrelated question is how war is to be prevented, or, to put it in a military framework, how one should use military force for the prevention of war.

Four questions in the Soviet concept of the correlation of world forces are discussed: the actors, the forces, the character of the correlation, and the role of the correlation in world development. The discussion concludes with a comment on the differences between the Soviet and the Western approaches. The Soviet concept differs from the traditional notion of the balance of power in three respects. First, it is based on the Marxist-Leninist philosophy, which sees the world as evolving according to the laws of history towards socialism; a favourable correlation of world forces is both the outcome of such a development and a condition of further progress. Secondly, Soviet politicians and scholars regard the international system as based on the interaction of two antagonistic camps, opposed to each other in their socio-economic and political systems, doctrines, and policies. Finally, the concept seems to entail three, or even four, kinds of correlation: 1) the correlation of power on the global scale; 2) the correlation on the highly important regional scale, i. e. which concerns the power of the Warsaw Treaty states and the NATO states in Europe; and 3) the correlation, within the socialist system, of the power of the Soviet Union and other states. Recently a fourth kind of correlation has been included: that between the Soviet Union and China, and it is regarded as playing a significant role in the world equation of power. Balance of power theories and models based on the concept of the interplay of a number of great powers are dismissed by Soviet scholars as outmoded and artificial, distort ing the real correlation of forces between the actual competitors. In spite of Soviet argumentation, the differences between Soviet and the traditional con cepts are not very clear. This is because the Soviet concept is treated as a means of policy rather than as a scientific construction. It is used to justify the status of the Soviet Union as one of the two leading world powers capable of backing by its military posture a widening range of interests; further to confirm Soviet predominance in the socialist camp; finally, to buttress the bargaining position of the Soviet Union in negotiations concerning arms control and regional cocrrelation of forces.

Lider, J. War and Politics: Clausewitz Today. Cooperation and Conflict, XII, 1977, 187-206. The study reviews the dispute on the nature of war in the West and in the Soviet Union. After a brief description of the Clausewitzian philosophy and his concepts of absolute and real war, three Western schools of thought - the so-called militaristic school, political realism and pacifism - as well as the Soviet concept of war are discussed in relation to the Clausewitzian scheme. Differences between the Western and Soviet philosophies of war are then analyzed. They consist in different inter pretations of the politics of war (emphasis on foreign policy in the West vs. internal war in the Soviet approach), and of the notion of war (focus on interstate war in the West vs. Soviet primacy of civil war), as well as in different perspectives on the future of war (unclear future in the West vs. the Soviet assertion about the disappearance of war after the inevitable world-wide triumph of socialism). The author maintains that the debate over the interpretation of the Clausewitzian formulas on war is useful for revealing basic differences and similarities between the two antagonistic interpreta tions of socio-political reality and may therefore contribute to the prevention of war.

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