Another ‘special relationship’: The British‐Swiss early cold war coordination of defence (1947–53)

Switzerland's participation in the highly political Marshall Plan was considered the utmost commitment the West could expect from this neutral country during the unfolding Cold War. In military matters, though, the national doctrine seemed to be applied most rigidly. Indeed, the Swiss refrained from establishing substantial contacts with their direct neighbours as well as with the chief sponsors of European security. Neutrality, however, did not prevent the Swiss from entertaining uniquely British‐oriented military relations, that culminated during the Korean war in a high degree of coordination of defence, wherein Field‐Marshal Montgomery played a crucial mediatory role.     

A question of trust: military defection during regime crises in Benin and Togo

This article examines the role of trust between military officers and opposition forces in fostering mass defections of military personnel during pro-democracy uprisings. The current literature on military defection emphasizes the role of either opposition characteristics, or government control policies. Combining the two, however, takes better account of defection as an interaction between officers and the opposition. Through an analysis of civil–military relations during mass uprisings in Benin (1989–1990) and Togo (1990–1993), this article finds that loyalist stacking creates a core of military personnel with a strong stake in regime preservation, while counterbalancing leaves open the possibility for a military-opposition alliance. Alliance also depends on civic resistance campaign characteristics (the unity of the movement, its nonviolent character, the presence of opposition leaders with social ties to military personnel) and promises to military personnel that acknowledge the latter groups’ interests. These findings provide a new theoretical framework for understanding military actions during regime crises.     

Constraining consolidation: military politics and democracy in Pakistan (2007–2013)

Why do some militaries retain high authoritarian prerogatives during transitions from militarized authoritarian rule? The Pakistan military's 2007 extrication shows that an important part of the answer lies in the level of structural differentiation between the “military government” and the “military institution”. Despite sustained contentious opposition to military rule, the high level of separation between these two military dimensions of the state allowed the institutional military to delink itself from the discredited dictatorship and exit on its own terms. In the post-authoritarian context, the military has preserved its expansive prerogatives by using a variety of adaptive contestation mechanisms – including the mobilization of the media and the judiciary – that act as a continuing source of political instability and uncertainty.     

Democratization and Civilian Control of the Military in Taiwan

Over the last 20 years, Taiwan has witnessed an impressive transition from authoritarian one-party rule to liberal democracy. This included considerable changes in the relations between the civilian political elites and the armed forces. While under the emergency laws of the authoritarian regime the military had been a powerful political force, during democratization the elected civilians have managed to curb military political power and have successively widened their influence over former exclusively military prerogatives. This article argues that the development of Taiwan's civil–military relations can be explained as the result of civilians using increasingly robust strategies to enhance their influence over the military. This was made possible by a highly beneficial combination of historical conditions and factors inside and outside the military that strengthened the political power of the civilian elites and weakened the military's bargaining power. The article finds that even though partisan exploitation of civilian control instruments could potentially arouse civil–military conflict in the future, civil–military relations in general will most likely remain supportive of the further consolidation of Taiwan's democracy.     

Military Culture and Restraint toward Civilians in War: Examining the Ugandan Civil Wars

What explains armed-group conduct toward civilians in war? The National Resistance Army (NRA) of Uganda demonstrated notable restraint toward civilians during its wars in northern Uganda in the 1980s, restraint that is puzzling given the overdetermined predictions for mass atrocity under rationalist, identity, and regime-type theories. Instead, the NRA case demonstrates that military culture—the organizational norms underlying combatant socialization—is a primary determinant of armed-group behavior, influencing combatant conduct in ways not conceptualized under existing theories of victimization. This review of the NRA case, based on field interviews with Ugandan military officers and examinations of Ugandan documentary archives, reveals three key points regarding the role of military culture in effecting restraint. First, the NRA case shows that organizational factors like military culture can determine military behavior toward civilians. Second, it reveals that theories of military culture, incorporating both formal and informal mechanisms of combatant socialization, can provide a more complete theoretical account than existing theories of armed-group conduct. Finally, the NRA provides potential hypotheses for mechanisms through which culture influences military behavior. I analyze the effect of culture on the NRA's conduct as a plausibility probe, generating inductive insights drawn from detailed field research to shed light on the organizational drivers of armed-group restraint. The NRA case thus points the way to a reconceptualization of military culture and the role of organizational factors that influence conflict behavior.     

Going on the Run: What Drives Military Desertion in Civil War?

Under which circumstances do soldiers and officers desert in a violent domestic conflict? This article studies individual military insubordination in the Syrian civil war, drawing on interviews with deserters from the Syrian army now based in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. A plausibility probe of existing explanations reveals that desertion opportunities originating in conflict events and the presence of safe-havens fail to explain individual deserters' decision making. Accounting for socio-psychological factors—moral grievances and fear—generates more promising results for an inquiry into the conditions under which military personnel desert. While moral concerns with continued military service contribute to accumulating grievances among military members engaged in the civil war, fear—that is, soldiers' concerns for their own safety—is a more effective triggering cause of desertion. The article presents a theory-generating case study on the causes of military insubordination and disintegration during violent conflict.     

The Post-Coup Military Spending Question Revisited, 1960–2000

Do military regimes spend more on the military than other regime types? All leaders cater to their winning coalition. For military leaders, core supporters are other members of the military. To solicit support from this group, first, leaders are persuaded to spend more on the military to ensure their political survival, while other autocratic leaders tend to view the military as a competing power center. Second, the cost of repressing challenges from the public in military regimes is cheaper than in other regimes; therefore, leaders in military regimes allocate more resources to the military to satisfy them. We test this argument by examining military spending in different regime types for 1960–2000. The empirical results from Prais-Winsten regression with panel-corrected standard errors indicate that military regimes allocate more, on average, to the military than other regimes and that military rulers brought into power through military coups or who have experienced military coup attempts against them increase their military resource allocation.     

印度新军事战略的经济意图

印度是一个科技实力较雄厚、经济发展较迅速的发展中国家 ,也是南亚和印度洋地区首屈一指的军事大国。 90年代以来 ,印度的军事战略发生了改变 ,与此同时 ,印度经济开始加快发展步伐。本文将通过研究印度的新军事战略类型 ,来分析印度实行这种新军事战略下的经济意图。     

Different Threats,Different Militaries:Explaining Organizational Practices in Authoritarian Armies

Why do some states generate competent, professional military organizations, while others fail to do so even when they have the required economic, demographic, and technological endowments? Variation in states’ military organizational practices—their core policies related to promotion patterns, training regimens, command arrangements, and information management—holds the key. This article develops a typology of such practices and explains why and how they vary in response to the internal and external threats facing particular regimes. The article then subjects this argument to a carefully designed plausibility probe comparing the threat environments and military organizational practices of two states whose differences are both intuitively and theoretically puzzling: North and South Vietnam during the period 1954–1975. The initial evidence provides support for the theory and casts doubt on existing explanations of military organizational behavior focused on external threats, democracy, or the degree of political intervention in the military. The findings have important implications for foreign policy, as well as for future research on authoritarianism, civil-military relations, and military effectiveness.     

Aid for arms: The impact of superpower economic assistance on military spending in Sub‐Saharan Africa

This study examines the relationship between superpower economic assistance and military allocations in 25 countries of Sub‐Saharan Africa during the period 1977–1984. Using pooled time‐series regression analysis, we find that African recipients do not treat U.S. aid as fungible. Soviet economic aid, however, is found to have a positive effect on the recipient's military spending.     

Military Structure,Civil Disobedience,and Military Violence

In this article, I argue that factors inherent to the structure of a military organization and their relationship with the political leadership play a role in the organization's tendency to perpetrate violence against civilians during civil disobedience campaigns. To examine this hypothesis, I conducted a three-phased statistical analysis on a database containing 97 campaigns that took place between 1972 and 2012. In the first phase, I examined the relationship between military centric factors and violent crackdowns. In the second phase, I examined the relationship between military centric factors and mass killing. In the third stage, I examined the relationship between two specific types of discrimination in the military and mass killing. I found strong evidence supporting the hypothesis mentioned above. High-risk militaries that served a militarized regime, contained loosely regulated or indoctrinated paramilitaries, and discriminated against the protesting group, were much more likely to perpetrate violence against civilians during civil disobedience campaigns than low-risk militaries. The conclusions of this study suggest that further examination of the military's role in perpetrating violence against civilians during protests and conflict may provide some novel findings.     

Managing the 1986-87 Sino-Indian Sumdorong Chu Crisis

ABSTRACT

How did China and India manage to prevent the 1986-87 Sumdorong Chu Crisis from escalating into a war? I argue that it was a combination of changing geopolitical factors (Sino-Soviet rapprochement and the end of Soviet support for India in the context of Sino-Indian tensions) and military factors (conventional deterrence and perceptions of limited revisionism) that help explain crisis management. While these geopolitical and military factors helped avert immediate escalation, the crisis truly ended only after China and India sought a new modus vivendi during Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s landmark trip to China in December 1988. The absence of great power (Soviet) support meant that India had to make a costly signal to China in the form of Gandhi’s trip that happened during the 1987-89 cycle of protests in Tibet against Chinese rule. Nevertheless, Gandhi’s visit took place after India had demonstrated its military strength and resolve in its ability to defend the status quo on the border, and therefore should not be interpreted as a sign of weakness. In other words, I argue that successful deterrence requires broader foreign policy reorientation. At the same time, considerations of power (in the form of internal/external balancing) are central to strategic stability in the Sino-Indian dyad, and that any recourse to diplomacy that ignores the realities of military power is unlikely to be successful for crisis management.     

大村益次郎的军制改革

日本近代军制的确立及近代化军队的形成始于明治初期的军制改革。首任兵部大辅大村益次郎在明治初期的军制建设过程中发挥了举足轻重的作用。在大村的主导下,明治政府大刀阔斧地开始军制改革,如创建政府军,统一军制,施行国民征兵制。上述举措不仅是日本迈向军事近代化的关键步伐,而且为其日后成为军事强国奠定了基础。     

Military Innovation's Dialectic: Gun Trucks and Rapid Acquisition

In times of war, the routes to innovation are often brutally radical instead of starry-eyed and fantastical. Still, compared with all the hype and hoopla about revolutionary technologies, little scholarly ink has been spilled over these “low-end” military innovations. “Field mods,” as they are often called, are not the sexy computerized drones and robotic sensations we associate with military innovation. This article recovers the process by which one such military innovation was created and argues that the seemingly bottom-up process of Gun Truck development was in fact a dialectical outcome that emerged from two different suborganization types: a learning organization and a bureaucratic stasis model. The findings from the case carry implications for innovation theory, our understanding of the nature of military organizations in war, and the challenge of technological change in wartime.     

Unpacking military emulation: absorptive capacity and German counterinsurgency doctrine during ISAF

ABSTRACT

Which organisational activities promote effective military emulation? Which variables facilitate and impede the emergence of these activities? Drawing upon the academic literatures on military change and management studies, as well as semi-structured interviews within the British and German militaries, this article identifies five key organisational activities which promote effective inter-organisational doctrinal learning. In doing so, the article improves understanding of the contribution that management studies can make to multi-disciplinary scholarship on military learning. The article examines the variables which facilitate the emergence of activities which support effective inter-organisational doctrinal learning through a case study of Bundeswehr doctrinal absorptive capacity during ISAF. It also explores the impact of these activities on doctrine development. The article demonstrates the crucial importance of active and well-informed civilian oversight of the activities which support military learning.     

Politics and Threat Perception: Explaining Pakistani Military Strategy on the North West Frontier

Abstract

Analysts and policymakers agree that the Pakistani military has engaged in selective repression of and collusion with armed groups. Yet beyond this general observation, fine-grained theory and evidence do not exist to systematically explain patterns of military strategy across groups and over time. This paper provides a theoretical framework for explaining regime perceptions of armed groups and the strategies state security managers pursue toward different types of groups. It then probes this framework using a combination of new medium-N data on military offensives, peace deals, and state–group alliances in Pakistan’s North West and four comparative case studies from North and South Waziristan. We argue that the Pakistani military—the key state institution in this context—has assigned armed groups to different political roles reflecting both their ideological affinity with the military and the operational benefits they can provide to the army. This mixture of instrumental and ideological motivations has created a complex blend of regime threat perceptions and state–group interactions across space and time. A clearer understanding of how the military views Pakistan’s armed political landscape can inform policy debates about the nature of Pakistani counterinsurgency, as well as broader theoretical debates about order and violence.     

A Smaller Military To Fight the War on Terror

The defense budget can be reduced and the U.S. military downsized because (1) the nation-state threat environment is markedly different than it was during the Cold War, and (2) a large military is not necessary to combat the terrorist threat. In fact, the Islamist terrorist threat is relatively undeterred by the U.S. military presence abroad, and U.S. forces abroad, particularly those deployed in Muslim countries, may do more to exacerbate than to diminish the threat. The arduous task of dismantling and degrading the terrorist network will largely be the task of unprecedented international intelligence and law enforcement cooperation, not the application of large-scale military force. To the extent the military is involved in the war on terror, it will be special forces in discrete operations against specific targets rather than large-scale military operations.     

The Bundeswehr and the Kunduz air strike 4 September 2009: Germany's post-heroic moment?

The article sets out to investigate Germany's involvement in the controversial 2009 Kunduz air strike in Afghanistan. Utilizing a theoretical framework derived from existing literature on postheroic warfare, it employs a detailed case study of this particular military engagement to highlight the operational, strategic, and cultural dimensions of Germany's operations in Afghanistan. Through an analysis of primary documents and field interviews, this paper concludes that German public opinion, politicians, soldiers and media reacted in ways that mirror closely theories of postheroic warfare. These included widespread condemnation of the air strike, increasing doubts about the Afghan mission, and emphasis on low-risk stand-off precision weapons, which paradoxically resulted in higher civilian casualties. Germans still have a long way to go to accept the brutal realities of military engagements that the Bundeswehr increasingly confronts during its expanded scope of post-cold war military operations.