Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION The Significance of Strategic Assessment -- TWO Explaining Variation in Strategic Assessment -- THREE Egypt in the Mid-1960s -- FOUR Egypt in the 1970s -- FIVE Britain and Germany and the First World War -- SIX Pakistan and Turkey in the Late 1990s -- SEVEN U.S. Postconflict Planning for the 2003 Iraq War -- CONCLUSION Findings and Implications -- REFERENCES -- INDEX
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This article explores shortcomings in military effectiveness in the war in Afghanistan. It focuses on three sets of problems: the failure to resolve internal contradictions in the training effort, the failure to integrate political considerations with military activity, and poor strategic and operational/tactical integration.
While social pressures have long been a theme in the targeting scholarship, this article develops and evaluates a theory for how social forces affect militant groups' tactical choices to target civilians. It first identifies a class of groups that exhibit community ties, which occur when a group operates in proximity to a referent society that is geographically concentrated and comprised of dense social networks. Through observable indicators of endorsement and condemnation to their tactics, groups gain information and are subjected to normative pressures from community members, which constrain their leaders' willingness to harm civilians. The argument is evaluated through within-case process tracing in qualitative case studies of the Provisional IRA during the Troubles and Palestinian Hamas in the 1990s. The findings demonstrate that both groups modified their tactics in conformity with social pressures, even when it was costly and contrary to their ideology, strategic, and organizational goals.
AbstractWhile social pressures have long been a theme in the targeting scholarship, this article develops and evaluates a theory for how social forces affect militant groups' tactical choices to target civilians. It first identifies a class of groups that exhibit community ties, which occur when a group operates in proximity to a referent society that is geographically concentrated and comprised of dense social networks. Through observable indicators of endorsement and condemnation to their tactics, groups gain information and are subjected to normative pressures from community members, which constrain their leaders' willingness to harm civilians. The argument is evaluated through within-case process tracing in qualitative case studies of the Provisional IRA during the Troubles and Palestinian Hamas in the 1990s. The findings demonstrate that both groups modified their tactics in conformity with social pressures, even when it was costly and contrary to their ideology, strategic, and organizational goals.
The U.S. military's prevailing norms of professionalism exhibit three paradoxes that render the organization poorly suited to meet contemporary challenges to its nonpartisan ethic, and that undermine its relations with civilian leaders. These norms, based on Samuel Huntington's objective civilian control model, argue that the military should operate in a sphere separate from the civilian domain of policymaking and decisions about the use of force. The first paradox is that Huntingtonian norms, though intended to prevent partisan and political behavior by military personnel, can also enable these activities. Second, the norms promote civilian leaders' authority in decisionmaking related to the use of force, yet undermine their practical control and oversight of military activity. Third, they contribute to the military's operational and tactical effectiveness, while corroding the United States' strategic effectiveness in armed conflict. These tensions in Huntington's norms matter today because of intensifying partisanship in society and in the military, the embrace by civilian leaders of objective control and their concomitant delegation of authority in armed conflict to the military, and growing questions about the causes of the inconclusive outcomes of the United States' recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is time to develop a new framework for military professionalism.
The subfield of civil–military relations has experienced a remarkable revitalization in recent years, yielding a wealth of intriguing insights. Yet, despite these auspicious developments, research remains unnecessarily divided across multiple dimensions: along the subdisciplinary boundaries of comparative, international, and American politics; within these subdisciplines by independent and dependent variables; by regional focus; by regime type analyzed (democratic, democratizing versus authoritarian); and by scholars' emphasis on normative versus positive analysis. This article aims to bridge existing divides and reduce fragmentation. It proposes several pathways forward, including proposing innovations in deductive theorizing, developing new analytical frameworks, and synthesizing and adjudicating empirical findings. It also suggests ways of bridging to research beyond the study of civil–military relations, such as that on the global phenomenon of democratic backsliding, the efficacy of nonviolent strategies of political struggle, military effectiveness, and the causes and outcomes of interstate war.
