scholarly journals The Hippie and the Snake-Eater

2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-28
Author(s):  
David Lin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Reagan Administration ◽  
Dynamic Range ◽  
Marine Corps ◽  
The United States ◽  
Defense Spending ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Military

An early-2008 Foreign Policy index found that 88% of active and retired American servicemen and women agree that the war in Iraq has stretched the United States military dangerously thin. Another 60% think that the US military today is weaker than it was five years ago. 74% of those surveyed hold low regards for the civilian leadership expressing that civilian policymakers set unreasonable goals for the US military to accomplish. With current military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan serving as backdrops, these inflections serve as the basis of a much-needed conversation on the evolving roles and responsibilities of civilian and military agencies in the post-conflict environment. The immediate solutions to the military’s frustrations have been logical if not only reactionary or temporary stopgaps. If the military is stretched too thin, then expand it. Over the next five years there will be substantial increases in the Army and Marine Corps by as much as over 90,000 troops. If the military is weakening, then strengthen it. The President’s 2008 defense budget pushes defense spending to levels not seen since the Reagan Administration, bringing with it a slew of new military hardware meant to keep the US military on the cutting edge of technology and flexible in the face of emerging threats. If the military is lacking comprehensive training and doctrine to combat insurgencies, then revise doctrine. In December 2007, the US Army and Marine Corps revamped their Counterinsurgency Field Manual, the first time in over two decades either service had published a field manual devoted to counterinsurgency.3 The next President of the United States will face a dynamic range of transnational threats that will likely make us rethink the way modern wars are fought. From terrorism and counterinsurgency to combating the spread of weapons of mass destruction, from illicit trafficking of drugs, people, and guns back to traditional conventional warfare with rising superpowers such as China and Russia, the United States must maintain a variety of diplomatic and military responses at its disposal. As emerging threats in the twenty-first century appear to be rooted at the nexus of security and development, a single-sided military solution cannot fully resolve a multi-dimensional problem. There is a need to develop a more comprehensive civil-military approach to combating terrorism, insurgency, and asymmetric warfare, something that has not fully materialized on the strategic or on the operational level. In order to do this, there is a need to tear down the stereotypes and reintroduce the hippie (statesmen) to the snake-eater (soldier).

Rethinking U.S. National Security after Covid19

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda J. Bilmes
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
United States ◽  
National Security ◽  
The United States ◽  
Emerging Diseases ◽  
Defense Spending ◽  
Federal Spending ◽  
Us Economy ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Military

AbstractThe United States has traditionally defined national security in the context of military threats and addressed them through military spending. This article considers whether the United States will rethink this mindset following the disruption of the Covid19 pandemic, during which a non-military actor has inflicted widespread harm. The author argues that the US will not redefine national security explicitly due to the importance of the military in the US economy and the bipartisan trend toward growing the military budget since 2001. However, the pandemic has opened the floodgates with respect to federal spending. This shift will enable the next administration to allocate greater resources to non-military threats such as climate change and emerging diseases, even as it continues to increase defense spending to address traditionally defined military threats such as hypersonics and cyberterrorism.

Eyes in the Sky

The Drone Age ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 96-130
Author(s):  
Michael J. Boyle
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Organizational Structures ◽  
The United States ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Military ◽  
Organizational Costs

Chapter 4 argues that drones accelerate the trend toward information-rich warfare and place enormous pressure on the military to learn ever more about the battlefields that it faces. Today, for the United States, war is increasingly a contest for information about any future battlespace. This has had an organizational effect as the ability for the United States to know more through drone imagery has turned into a necessity to know more. The US military is becoming so enamored of its ability to know more through drone surveillance that it is overlooking the operational and organizational costs of “collecting the whole haystack.” Using drones for a vast surveillance apparatus, as the United States and now other countries have been doing, has underappreciated implications for the workload, organizational structures, and culture of the military itself.

US Space Force will start small and then evolve

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Air Force ◽  
Marine Corps ◽  
The United States ◽  
Coast Guard ◽  
Arms Race ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us

Subject Creation of the US Space Force. Significance President Donald Trump on February 19 signed a directive ordering the Pentagon to draw up legislation establishing a Space Force as the sixth branch of the US military, alongside the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard. Impacts A separation of air and space budgets could positively affect future military space modernisation and development programmes. Creation of the Space Force could ultimately move the United States closer towards openly putting weapons in space. If China and Russia perceive it this way, it creates the risk of an arms race in space.

Crisis in the Civil-Military Triangle?

2020 ◽  
pp. 191-206
Author(s):  
William E. Rapp
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The People ◽  
The Us ◽  
High Regard ◽  
The Government ◽  
Military Relations ◽  
The Military

Despite the high regard for the US military by the American public, a number of tensions continue to grow in civil-military relations in the United States. These are exacerbated by a lack of clarity, and thus productive debate, in the various relationships inherent in civil and military interaction. By trisecting civil military relations into the relations between the people and the military, the military and the government, and the people and the government on military issues, this chapter examines the potential for crisis in coming years. Doing so allows for greater theoretical and popular understanding and thus action in addressing the tensions, for there is cause for concern and action in each of the legs of this interconnected triangle.

Life and Limb: New Estimates of Casualty Aversion in the United States

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanisha M Fazal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Military Medicine ◽  
The United States ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
Notable Increase ◽  
Dramatic Shift ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Military ◽  
Casualty Aversion

Abstract Dramatic improvements in US military medicine have produced an equally dramatic shift in the kinds of battle casualties the US military has sustained in its most recent wars. Specifically, there has been a notable increase in the ratio of nonfatal to fatal casualties. Most studies of casualty aversion in the United States, however, have focused on fatal casualties. Using a series of survey experiments, I investigate whether respondents are equally sensitive to fatal and nonfatal casualties, differences between populations with and without close military ties, and whether views on casualties are conditioned by respondents’ level of knowledge about casualties or the individual costs of war they expect to incur. I find that, while the general public is generally insensitive to different types of casualties, respondents with close ties to the military are better able to distinguish among kinds of casualties. This advantage, however, is not due to respondents with close military ties being better informed about war casualties. Instead, those who bear the costs of war directly appear better able to distinguish among those costs.

The Soviet Factor in the US-China Military-Technical Cooperation during the Cold War

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 12-47
Author(s):  
Yinan Li
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Active Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
Technical Cooperation ◽  
Arms Sales ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

The development of the PRC’s armed forces included three phases when their modernization was carried out through an active introduction of foreign weapons and technologies. The first and the last of these phases (from 1949 to 1961, and from 1992 till present) received wide attention in both Chinese and Western academic literature, whereas the second one — from 1978 to 1989 —when the PRC actively purchased weapons and technologies from the Western countries remains somewhat understudied. This paper is intended to partially fill this gap. The author examines the logic of the military-technical cooperation between the PRC and the United States in the context of complex interactions within the United States — the USSR — China strategic triangle in the last years of the Cold War. The first section covers early contacts between the PRC and the United States in the security field — from the visit of R. Nixon to China till the inauguration of R. Reagan. The author shows that during this period Washington clearly subordinated the US-Chinese cooperation to the development of the US-Soviet relations out of fear to damage the fragile process of detente. The second section focuses on the evolution of the R. Reagan administration’s approaches regarding arms sales to China in the context of a new round of the Cold War. The Soviet factor significantly influenced the development of the US-Chinese military-technical cooperation during that period, which for both parties acquired not only practical, but, most importantly, political importance. It was their mutual desire to undermine strategic positions of the USSR that allowed these two countries to overcome successfully tensions over the US arms sales to Taiwan. However, this dependence of the US-China military-technical cooperation on the Soviet factor had its downside. As the third section shows, with the Soviet threat fading away, the main incentives for the military-technical cooperation between the PRC and the United States also disappeared. As a result, after the Tiananmen Square protests, this cooperation completely ceased. Thus, the author concludes that the US arms sales to China from the very beginning were conditioned by the dynamics of the Soviet-American relations and Beijing’s willingness to play an active role in the policy of containment. In that regard, the very fact of the US arms sales to China was more important than its practical effect, i.e. this cooperation was of political nature, rather than military one.

scholarly journals The Convergence of Military Conduct and Policing in Israeli-Controlled Territories

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Nir Gazit ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Police Officer ◽  
The United States ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Media Attention ◽  
Military Forces ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Impact

The murder of George Floyd by a police officer in the United States in May 2020 and the subsequent turmoil, as well as the violence against migrants on the US-Mexican border, have drawn major public and media attention to the phenomenon of police brutality (see, e.g., Levin 2020; Misra 2018; Taub 2020), which is often labeled as ‘militarization of police’. At the same time, in recent years military forces have been increasingly involved in policing missions in civilian environments, both domestically (see, e.g., Kanno-Youngs 2020; Schrader 2020; Shinkman 2020) and abroad. The convergence of military conduct and policing raises intriguing questions regarding the impact of these tendencies on the military and the police, as well as on their legitimacy.

scholarly journals Limits and Possibilities of the United States Military in Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Stabilization

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alcir Santos Neto
Keyword(s):  
Nation Building ◽  
The United States ◽  
Humanitarian Assistance ◽  
Inspector General ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Post War ◽  
Military Engagement

This study probes the limits and possibilities of US military efforts to facilitate the transition from warfighting to nation-building. Most comparative studies conceive the complexity of this transition along a spectrum from conflict to humanitarian assistance to post-conflict stabilization. While the last two stages have often been interpreted as a coordinated act of civil-military ‘nation-building’; the spectrum, in fact, represents an ideal type simplification. At one level, outcomes depend on the players involved, including: sovereign nations, national militaries, international and regional institutions, UN peacekeepers, private security contractors, and non-governmental humanitarian providers, among others. On the other hand, because the number, types, and causes of case outcomes are highly diverse and contingent upon many possible factors (among them for example: political, economic, military, organizational, humanitarian, cultural, and religious), institutions like the US military face serious difficulties both planning and coordinating post-conflict scenarios. Assuming this complex backdrop, the present study offers a qualitative analysis of two recent US government reports by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) and the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) on US military engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both cases, the US government sought to ‘nation-build’ by facilitating post-war stabilization and humanitarian assistance, detailing its genuine efforts to record both processes. While results indicate some limited successes in both cases, they also indicate a familiar pattern of uneven performance failures consistent with other cases internationally. The analysis concludes with recommendations for further research that may better control the contingencies of post-conflict management.

A White Man’s War?

2020 ◽  
pp. 39-68
Author(s):  
Brian Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black Men ◽  
The United States ◽  
Us Army ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
Founding Principle ◽  
Proper Response

This chapter looks at the first two years of the Civil War, when black men were barred from serving in the US Army. It follows the debate that black Northerners conducted about the proper response to the call to serve in the US military, which they were sure would come at some point. Immediate enlistment advocates sparred with those who counseled withholding enlistment until African Americans’ demands had been met. Black Northerners began to articulate the terms under which they would serve the Union, among which citizenship emerged as central, as well as the changes necessary to bring lived reality in the United States in line with the founding principle of equality.

A Century of US Diplomatic Security

2019 ◽  
pp. 11-36
Author(s):  
Patrick Cullen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
Military Units

The United States' diplomatic security apparatus that operates today from Washington DC to Iraq and Afghanistan is uniquely massive. It is incomparable in its size, budget, degree of institutionalization, and level of sophistication when set against both other nations as well as its own humble origins in WWI. To understand why this is so, the first half of this chapter historically maps and causally explains how, and why, US diplomatic security has been transformed over the course of its modern hundred-year history. The second half provides an empirically rich study of the various roles and functions of the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security and the US military units that protect the US diplomatic mission.

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