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11. Blurred Lines: Mexican Cartels and the Narco-Terrorism Debate

Author:
Alexander Salt
Publication Date:
09-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
Institution:
Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies
Abstract:
Since 2006, well over 70 000 lives have been claimed by Cartel and narcotics related violence in Mexico. The sheer scale of this conflict has attracted considerable scholarly attention, particularly that which seeks to classify what type of violence this is, be it terrorism, insurgency or something else altogether. This paper addresses this issue by asking: Can Mexican Cartels be considered terrorist organizations? The paper explores the evolution of the Cartels in Mexico from 2006-present, analyzing their motivations, tactics and operations, organizational structures, and targets of violence. The paper concludes that Cartels should not be defined as terrorists as they lack political motives for their use of violence. However, Cartels can be said to have a dual nature; sometimes they act like terrorists in terms of their operational and tactical level behavior, and the rest of the time they act as illicit businessmen.
Topic:
War on Drugs, Narcotics Trafficking, Violence, and Drugs
Political Geography:
United States, Canada, North America, and Mexico

12. Pick your Poison: Assessing the Strategic Effectiveness of Decapitation via Drone Strikes by Looking at the Organizational Dynamics of Targeted Groups

Author:
Gabriel Boulianne Gobeil
Publication Date:
09-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
Institution:
Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies
Abstract:
Leadership targeting, or decapitation, which involves the removal of an organization’s leader, has been utilized in various military conflicts. The use of drones has been particularly consequential in such schemes, earning themselves the reputation of being “Washington’s weapon of choice.” The existing literature on leadership targeting gravitates around the question of the practice’s strategic effectiveness, focusing on the targeted groups’ internal characteristics to explain their (in)ability to withstand decapitation. However, this literature overlooks a key feature of terrorist groups, namely their identity’s organizational dynamics. Highlighting the importance of group identities in determining the outcome of decapitations, this article fills this void. Looking at the cases of al Qaeda in Iraq and Ansar al-Sharia in Yemen, it argues that groups which have a global identity are likely to retain cohesion when their leaders are the victim of decapitation while groups whose identity stems from an ethnic or tribal lineage tend to fragment, therefore creating “veto players.”
Topic:
Terrorism, Military Strategy, Drones, Leadership, and Conflict
Political Geography:
United States, Iraq, Middle East, and Yemen

13. The combat utility of the U.S. fleet aircraft carrier in the post-war period

Author:
Ben Wan and Beng Ho
Publication Date:
04-2016
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
Institution:
Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies
Abstract:
The fleet aircraft carrier possesses a number of unique advantages such as territorial independence and mobility that make it the United States National Command Authorities’ platform of choice to deal with a crisis or war. Nevertheless, it must be noted that the successful and unencumbered application of American carrier airpower in the post-war period has been significantly aided by the benign environments where the flat-tops have operated. In the modern combat environment, critics contend that anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities would render the vessel obsolete. Uncertainty clouds this issue as American carriers have yet to be subjected to A2/AD threats. Nevertheless, it is possible to draw two conclusions based on related empirical evidence. They are namely, 1) the submarine poses a credible challenge to American flat-tops, provided the sub is able to find and track them; 2) the anti-ship missile constitutes less of a “mission-kill” threat compared to the torpedo.
Topic:
Military Strategy, Maritime, Missile Defense, and Air Force
Political Geography:
United States and North America

14. Command Decision: Leadership Lessons from the Strategic Air War Against Germany

Author:
Lee Lacy
Publication Date:
04-2016
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
Institution:
Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies
Abstract:
The history of strategic bombing in World War II is well-documented, but is also found in the unlikeliest of places, in a theatrical production performed in the New York theater—on Broadway— in 1947. The play, Command Decision, by William Wister Haines, is an examination of the decision making process involved with the strategic bombing campaign in the European Theater of Operations. This paper uses Command Decision to examine real events in 1943—notably the raids on industrial targets of Regensburg, Schweinfurt and Stuttgart, where the 8th USAAF sustained punishing losses. Out this terrible episode of the war, when thousands of airmen lost their lives, the lessons of the bombing campaign’s Combined Bomber Offensive are significant. The leaders, events and decisions that influenced this intense and deadly episode of World War II remain relevant. The powerful lessons of leadership and command— mixed with human failing and the suffering of mankind, make a compelling story.
Topic:
Military Strategy, World War II, and Air Force
Political Geography:
United States, Europe, and North America

15. At the Edges of the Map: The Chronotope of Informatics and Maps of Human Terrain

Author:
Riley Collins and Sabrina Peric
Publication Date:
08-2016
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies
Abstract:
Cultural data gathered by researchers has provided militaries across the globe with intelligence and a unique insight into a category of analysis that is not normally given primacy in military strategic planning. Such data has been used in the past; it was used during World War Two to gain insight into the Japanese mind; it was used during British Colonial pacification efforts in Northern Africa; and it is again used today by the U.S. armed forces’ Human Terrain Teams to understand and relay cultural expectations and needs of occupied communities. This paper examines how the U.S. forces relate to an idea of culture for consumption as intelligence through an analysis of the Human Terrain Teams Handbook. Through this lens, we show how the U.S. armed forces condition members of Human Terrain Teams to interact with and think about local cultures in certain ways that are operationally relevant to military activities.
Topic:
Intelligence, Military Strategy, and Culture
Political Geography:
Africa, United States, Japan, Asia, and North Africa

16. An Awkward Tango: Pairing Traditional Military Planning to Design and Why It Currently Fails to Work

Author:
Ben Zweibelson
Publication Date:
03-2015
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies
Abstract:
Over the past decade, traditional military planning methodology and doctrine has gained an unlikely dance partner-the ambiguous, conceptual, and controversial process called ‘design.’ Although I will expand in this article on what exactly traditional military planning’ constitutes as a methodology, readers familiar with the debate over conceptual and detailed planning will recognize traditional military planning as the linear, analytic process grounded in metrics, categories, and objective scientific tenets. Many call this ‘detailed planning’ to refer synonymously to traditional military problem-solving, reflecting a military institutional practice of developing specific, sequential, and highly scientific-based plans that are quantifiable (analytical, objective) according to an accepted language, format, and professional education.4Unlike detailed planning, design as an emerging practice evokes eclectic combinations of philosophy, social sciences, complexity theory, and often improvised, unscripted approaches in a tailored or “one of a kind” practice. Ultimately, design becomes something beyond military planning entirely, thus we should avoid an “either or” sort of debate with design and detailed planning. Although this article employs the metaphor of awkward dancing partners, the metaphor is incomplete in that design may “dance” with detailed planning, while also able to depart the dance floor and do things that detailed planning is simply incapable of. However, for military professionals facing complex problems, we might continue the awkward tango metaphor for this article in that a military might employ both design and detailed planning in many conflict environments.Both design and detailed planning are elements of sensemaking, where for military applications we derive the notion of ‘planning’ and ‘knowing’ in a broad sense as an integral part of comprehending reality. Planning is subordinate to ‘knowing’ in that the detailed blueprints for constructing a tank are subordinate to the conceptual design of“how does one construct an armored vehicle to dominate specific terrain”? Planning is subordinate to design, with detailed planning further subordinate to various types of planning, with ill-structured conflict environments requiring militaries to whirl various dancing partners of design and planning across confusing and dynamic dance floors. Yet as our associated western military doctrine, military education, and practice in conflict environments demonstrates repeatedly, we are unable to get these dance partners to work together as a team, or move to the music for purposes of effectively creating and directing useful action for a military organization.5Institutionally and as a practicing community of professionals, the Western military has little trouble agreeing upon the general principles of traditional planning.6Yet we collectively remain fiercely divided, confused, and often resistant to design in any form, whether a rival methodology, complimentary, or even a subset of traditional planning.7‘Military Design’ comes in as many shades and patterns as service camouflage patterns now, and just as uniform differences symbolize organizational relevance and identity, so do the various service-centric design versions available for sensemaking and subsequent planning applications. Design has become so much of a stumbling block that the U.S. Army has devoted multiple research projects on design integration using the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, and in 2011 revised Army design doctrine with a name change and “rebranding” complete with academic realignments.8While the U.S. Army has cycled through several incarnations of design in the past decade, American Joint doctrine (which strongly influences other western military doctrines) has separated design from ‘operational design’ while casting both within traditional planning, resulting in a rather befuddled operational force. The U.S. military Joint Staff’s Planner’s Handbook for Operational Design from 2011 offers the following explanation: In general, the terms [design and operational design] have been related but not identical. The focus of discussion and writing on design during the past three years has been on the critical and creative thinking and learning required to understand complex operational environments and ill-defined problems facing the commander. Such understanding should facilitate early development of a broad operational approach that can guide the more detailed planning process. Operational design is a construct that joint doctrine has used since 2002 to encompass various elements of operational design (previously called facets of operational art) that planners have applied to develop a framework for a campaign or major operation... In essence, the above explanation conveys that joint doctrine’s operational design has embraced and subsumed design’s philosophy and general methodology.” 9 Thus, United States military organizations at the Joint level apply some aspects of the service-specific “Army Design Methodology” into joint doctrine where “operational design” functions more as a reverse-engineering planning project for campaign construction.10 This confuses military professionals because our organizations are not only mixing terms and concepts, but engaging far too much in methodological discussions without getting above it all and into the challenging abstract levels this article will offer. Although “design” is intended in the various U.S. Army doctrinal incarnations to be an iterative and adaptive sensemaking process for focusing critical and creative thinking on complex military problems, the American Army struggles to make sense of why military organizations have so many problems grasping what design is, and how it integrates into traditional military decision making. 11 With all of these different interpretations of how to make sense of complex military situations with ‘design’, is it any wonder why our militaries remains unable, or perhaps at a deeper institutional level, unwilling to integrate design effectively with traditional planning? We need to explore why traditional military planning and design theory remain awkward dance partners, and where we might try to nudge the larger Western military institution towards in the future. The difference goes beyond superficial arguments on language, doctrine, or conflict environments- it has to do with how the military prefers to make sense of the world beyond methodologies entirely.
Topic:
Military Strategy and Military Affairs
Political Geography:
United States

17. A Tran-Atlantic Condominium of Democratic Power: the grand design for a post-war order at the heart of French policy at the Paris Peace Conference

Author:
Peter Jackson
Publication Date:
07-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
Institution:
Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies
Abstract:
France’s policy at the Paris Peace Conference has long been characterised as a bid to destroy German power and to secure a dominant position in the post-1918 European political order. The strategy and tactics of French premier Georges Clemenceau are nearly always contrasted with those of American president Woodrow Wilson. Clemenceau is represented as an arch cynic and committed practitioner of Realpolitik while Wilson is depicted as an idealist proponent of a new approach to international politics. The earliest, and one of the most extreme, articulation of this view was advanced by John Maynard Keynes in his Economic Consequences of the Peace. In what remains the most influential book ever written about the peace conference, Keynes characterised Clemenceau as a French Bismarck and the chief advocate of a ‘Carthaginian peace’.1 This judgement has reverberated through the historiography of the European international politics ever since.2 This general picture misses important dimensions to French planning and thus to the possibilities for peace in 1919. The evidence reveals that the peace programme of the Clemenceau government was much more open-ended and innovative than is generally recognised. French negotiators did propose a highly traditional project to overthrow the European balance of power by detaching the Left Bank of the Rhine from Germany and placing this region under permanent occupation. But there were other currents in French planning and policy that have been neglected. The French peace programme, as it emerged in February-March 1919, was a complex combination of power political calculation and an ideological commitment to a democratic peace based on new principles of international politics. Alongside the aim of territorial adjustment and a weakening of German power was a thoroughly trans-Atlantic conception of a democratic post-war order that allowed for the possibility of political and economic co- operation with a reformed and democratic Germany. The flexible and fundamentally multilateral character of this ‘larger strategic design’ overlapped with prevailing internationalist visions of peace and security in ways that have been missed by most scholars. French policy was much more ambiguous than Clemenceau was later willing to admit. Along with his chief lieutenant André Tardieu, he would spend much of the 1920s denouncing the failure of successive governments to impose the letter of the Versailles Treaty.4 But this post-war posturing has done much to obscure the complex character of his government’s peace programme.
Topic:
Diplomacy, International Cooperation, World War I, and Transatlantic Relations
Political Geography:
United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany

18. Hic Sunt Dracones!

Author:
Terry Terriff, James Keeley, and John Ferris
Publication Date:
03-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
Institution:
Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies
Abstract:
The US and a coalition of allies are once again intervening in the Middle East. This time it is in response to the rapid military advancement of Daesh, the acronym Arabic speakers use for the Arabic name of ISIS, Al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham. Some ten weeks into the start of military operations a common view is that the coalition's aerial campaign has only had limited success at best. On the plus side, coalition air power coupled with local forces on the ground were able to save a great many Iraqi Yazidis who were being threatened by Daesh, but equally a great many of this sectarian minority were massacred and, in the case of women and girls, raped or sold into sexual slavery. The Kurds subsequent to the initial retreat of their much vaunted Peshmerga forces have been able to stabilize their fighting lines against Daesh and regain control of the important Mosul dam. This particular success is in part due to the Kurds themselves and in part due to the support of coalition air strikes and delivery of supplies, but it also appears to be due in part to Daesh turning its focus to Anbar and northern Syria. On the negative side, Daesh not only continues to hold Mosul, among many other Iraqi cities and towns, but it has also expanded its control of territory in Anbar province from where it now poses a potential threat to Baghdad and areas in and around the Iraqi capital city. Daesh also made significant advances in northern Syria where it threatened to overrun the Kurdish city of Kobane on the Syria-Turkey border, creating the looming prospect of the massacre of the fighters and civilians still there. Over the past few days the intensification of coalition air strikes in and around this city appears to have halted and at least partially pushed back the Daesh assault, but the city and its inhabitants are far from being safe as it could still fall in the days and weeks to come.
Political Geography:
United States, Middle East, and Kurdistan

19. Friction, Chaos and Order(s): Clausewitz, Boyd and Command Approaches

Author:
Martin Samuels
Publication Date:
03-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
Institution:
Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies
Abstract:
A former writer of British military doctrine, Jim Storr, recently lamented that, although many books explore what happens in war (history) or why wars happen (international relations), very few focus on how wars should be fought (warfare). He concluded this reflects warfare's status as 'a poorly developed discipline'. Consequently, 'It is incoherent, contains a range of poorly described phenomena and is pervaded by paradox.' The underdeveloped discourse concerning warfare, and within it the limited consideration of different approaches to command, may be considered an important contributor to the longstanding gulf between the doctrine of Mission Command espoused by the United States and British armies and actual operational practice, such that the doctrine is 'realized only in some places some of the time'.
Political Geography:
Britain and United States

20. Thomas H. Henriksen. America and the Rogue States. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Publication Date:
03-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
Institution:
Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies
Abstract:
In America and the Rogue States, Thomas Henriksen lays out the relationships that exist, and have existed, between America and the states that made up George W. Bush's 'Axis of Evil.' Henriksen outlines the history of the interactions between the United States and North Korea, pre-invasion Iraq, and Iran, and through this draws out a number of themes. He also shows that the ways the relationships have played out are highly situational and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. In the last chapter, Henriksen explores American relationships with a number of states that were either once considered rogue or could become rogue, like Libya, Syria, and Cuba, referring to them as either “lesser rogues” or “troublesome states.” These states have remained “a puzzle for US foreign policy” (1) and are characterized by three things: autocratic governance, sponsorship of terrorism, and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). There is no clear definition provided by Henriksen for what can be considered a rogue state, making it difficult to judge what other states, if any, could be considered rogue. Henriksen seems to arbitrarily decide who is rogue and who is not: Cuba is a rogue state, while Myanmar is merely troublesome. Instead of synthesizing a clear definition of the term, something that could then be applied to other states in order to judge their 'rogueness,' Henriksen uses the Bush administration's criteria (the term itself was coined by President Bill Clinton in a 1994 speech in Brussels), which was outlined in the National Security Strategy of 2002 (NSS-2002). These were “brutality toward their own people; contempt for international law; determination to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD); advanced military technology; sponsorship of terrorism; rejection of human rights values; and hatred for the United States and 'everything it stands for'”. The use of the NSS-2002 definition allows for the 'Axis of Evil' to fit neatly into the term, which constitutes a problem of tautology, at least for the Bush administration. Further compounding this was that, according to Henriksen at least, the administration was set on going to war in Iraq prior to assuming office. This creates a situation in which it is hard to determine whether the idea of rogue states was created to justify this desire, or it informed the desire prior to the administration taking office.
Topic:
Foreign Policy and Terrorism
Political Geography:
United States, America, North Korea, and Libya