Suchergebnisse

What role will armed forces play in a world that is turbulent yet no longer organized by the bipolar conflict of East and West? In this volume, leading experts from several disciplines assess the rapidly changing global strategic and cultural landscape, examining how it will affect the responsibilities and social standing of the modern military. There are provocative disagreements among the contributors, especially over whether we should expect and prepare for another global war. However, the contributors generally agree on several broad themes that guide their analysis. Arguing that the Cold War has masked basic trends that have been reshaping the international system for a long time, they suggest that the sovereign states' dominance of the international system is rapidly coming to an end, as multinational, ethnic, regional, and religious groups-to name a few-increasingly affect the course of global affairs. In the absence of a clear "enemy," the military faces an identity crisis. In the postmodern atmosphere of this multicentric global order, authority is fragmented, and the exercise of any one authority is subject to greater scrutiny and challenge. The military has become more accepting of a variety of values, life-styles, and attitudes toward its tasks. At the same time, support for the military's mission is difficult to win, requiring endless justification. The authors believe that the principal missions for the military in these new times are peacekeeping, peacemaking, and humanitarian assistance. They examine the prospects for successful operations in these areas, taking into account the cultural lag between world structures that favor increased multinational peacekeeping forces and individual nations that supply token resources to support such efforts. This volume provides a sophisticated and thought-provoking perspective on the future role of the military in the coming decades. It is sure to enrich the vigorous debate surrounding these issues.

"When the cold war ended, many hoped it signified enhanced prospects for a more stable world. However, despite favorable political developments, the post-cold war period has been marked by turbulence, uncertainty, and challenge. The actions of rogue states such as Iraq and North Korea have made nuclear proliferation more unpredictable. Violence in Somalia and Bosnia has cast doubt on the viability of international peacekeeping arrangements. Hopes for expanding democratization have been dimmed by assertions that the values of liberal democracy and human rights are incompatible with non-Western cultures. The Adaptive Military describes how military security policies and practices have adapted to these new times and explains why such changes are necessary.The central argument is that current conflicts have been shaped by long-term trends, which increased the number and complexity of threats that the developed world is supposed to meet, and correspondingly decreased the stock of social and political options available to meet them.Although the authors differ in their assessments about the current prospects for peace and ways to maintain security, the issues they address are as critical as they were at the end of the Cold War. Mobilizing resources and political support for remote and difficult enterprises will always remain contentious, but if we recognize the hazard of letting violence run unopposed throughout the world, then we bear some responsibility to consider how it might be checked. This volume is an exercise of that responsibility. It will be of great interest to experts in military studies and international relations."--Provided by publisher.

Following the 9/11 attacks, a war against al Qaeda by the U.S. and its liberal democratic allies was next to inevitable. But what kind of war would it be, how would it be fought, for how long, and what would it cost in lives and money? None of this was known at the time. What came to be known was that the old ways of war must change-but how? Now, with over a decade of political decision-making and warfighting to analyze, How 9/11 Changed Our Ways of War addresses that question. In particular it assesses how well those ways of war, adapted to fight terrorism, affect our military capacity to protect and sustain liberal democratic values. The book pursues three themes: what shaped the strategic choice to go to war; what force was used to wage the war; and what resources were needed to carry on the fight? In each case, military effectiveness required new and strict limits on the justification, use, and support of force. How to identify and observe these limits is a matter debated by the various contributors. Their debate raises questions about waging future wars-including how to defend against and control the use of drones, cyber warfare, and targeted assassinations. The contributors include historians, political scientists, and sociologists; both academics and practitioners.

This article reviews civil-military relations theory applied to mature democratic states. It assumes that the important theoretical problem is how to maintain a military that sustains and protects democratic values, showing how the classic and still influential theories of Huntington and Janowitz were rooted, respectively, in liberal and civic republican theories of democracy and, as a result, neither adequately solved this problem. The article then uses current research to pose new questions about the relations between military and political elites, the relations of civilians to the military and the state, and the multinational use of force. Based on the review, it concludes that a new theory of civil-military relations-one that accounts for the circumstances mature democracies presently face and tells how militaries can sustain as they protect democratic values cannot be derived from either liberal or civic republican models of democracy, as Huntington and Janowitz tried to do, but might be derived from federalist models.