What if how presidents talk about ending wars contributes to the cycle of U.S. military intervention? Stephen J. Heidt answers 6+1 questions about his new book.
It won't be too long before we start to get a better understanding of what foreign policy in a Trump Administration will actually look like. It's useful to keep in mind that current rhetoric is no...
Amidst all the political drama this week, one could be forgiven for not noting the 25th anniversary of the Chapultepec Peace Agreement. Chapultepec was the agreement that brought a negotiated end to...
Happy Birthday to Dr. Martin Luther King! In his honor here is his favorite singer, the majestic Mahalia Jackson, singing the theme song for the civil rights movement--"We Shall Overcome." After...
*Post written with my coauthor Ryan Maness. We are currently rounding the corner and almost ready to submit the final version of our Cyber Conflict book. This post represents ongoing research as we fill out unanswered questions in our text. My coauthor and I have dissected the contemporary nature of cyber conflict in many ways, from cataloging all actual cyber incidents and disputes between states, to examining cyber espionage, and finally, examining the impact of cyber incidents on the conflict-cooperation nexus of states. What we have not done until now is examine the nature of what we...
Post by Steven Ward and Paul Musgrave The Obama administration’s plans to shrink the U.S. military attracted intense media attention yesterday. The plan is being described as a maneuver to shift the United States’s defense posture away from protracted occupations, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, and toward a more conventional deterrence role. It’s easy to exaggerate the scale of the changes to the military budget. In particular, the soundbite that the post-cut U.S. Army will be the smallest since before the Second World War is seriously misleading. According to the Historical...
Dan Levine sent on this great write up of the Israeli Defense Force’s (IDF) problems with social media. A few highlights: “In 2010, a soldier in the artillery corps posted this status: “Cleaning up Katana and home on Thursday.” Katana is a village in the West Bank. The status revealed the time of the planned raid and the unit involved. The other soldiers in the unit, also apparently glued to their screens, saw the update and, feeling imperiled, let the authorities know.” “Later that year the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate sent out a bulletin to soldiers featuring photos of drones...
Will this morning's links betray my grumpiness? I hope not but today's meme that the US and the West are in danger of losing Ukraine drives me a bit crazy. It wasn't in my pocket... was it in yours? Anyhow, the big news out of Washington, DC is about the big defense cuts proposed by SecDef Hagel. Lots of choices being made, including controversial ones like eliminating the A-10s for a plane that is still mostly air (the F-35) and so on. How much of this will actually happen? No idea. But it has produced some interesting thoughts including Lt. General H.R. McMaster on the fallacies of...
This fifth activity comes after students are to have listened to lectures about coordination (slides) and collaboration (slides) problems. I led off with a coordination problem that might not have been too difficult to overcome even if I didn't allow them to confer, but was trivially solved given that I did. (If you're wondering, I allowed that precisely because it would allow me to draw a contrast between coordination problems and collaboration problems. Though the former are not trivial, I don't think, they're certainly easier to overcome.) Then came the tricky part. The dominant strategy...
Good morning Ducks, here are your links from South Asia... (I am not even going to pretend I know what's going on in the Ukraine, Syria, Somalia, or Venezuela. I'll stick to what I sort of know...). Vasundhara Sirnate at The Hindu writes passionately in defence of the offensive. While Indian liberals will (rightfully) continue to be upset at Penguin India's capitulation to the so called "offended" feelings of a small and obscure group of Hindu fanatics, the liberals fail to realize that the increasing pressure to censor and protect the sentiments of various religious communities is actually...
Why are we late with Friday Nerd Blogging? Because we were too busy celebrating all that is awesome:
Editor's note: this post previously appeared on my personal blog. This fourth activity comes after students are to have listened (slides) to a lecture on how states are currently leaving a lot of money lying on the ground by failing to cooperate more fully. The examples I used all concern economic cooperation—specifically, how there'd be a whole lot more stuff to go around if states changed their trade, exchange rate, and immigration policies—though I discuss other areas where states fail to reap all the available benefits of cooperation in other lectures. Look below the fold for details....