Changing Character Of War Research Articles

Assessing the Compatibility of Conventional Military Doctrines With the Changing Character of War: A Case of Indo-Pak Rivalry

Military doctrines integrate and encourage armed forces to pursue their strategic objectives while acting as an instrument to forestall conflicts by retaining credible deterrence. However, the acquisition of nuclear weapons and access to sophisticated technologies have significantly changed the character of warfare, adding layers to the complexity. This strategic shift has resulted in the diversification of sub-conventional warfare in the subcontinent, blurring the line between war and peace. In the case of Indo-Pak rivalry, non-contact warfare has gained currency, yet both states continue to prioritize conventional military doctrines when engaging each other in sub-conventional domain. Furthermore, this article argues that the compatibility of conventional military doctrines with the changing character of warfare is uncertain, and this is a topic of debate that merits through investigation and analysis.

On Strachan

The work of Hew Strachan as Chichele Professor of the History of War at Oxford University in 2002–2015 encompassed many distinct aspects, of which three are considered here. First, as co-founder, and then Director, of the notably interdisciplinary Oxford University research programme on the Changing Character of War. Second, as contributor to public and governmental debate, by authoring and editing a wide range of books and other publications on contemporary wars and the history of strategic thought, and also by serving on public and governmental bodies concerned with the problem of war – including the UK Defence Academy Advisory Board. Thirdly, as a university teacher, facing the familiar problem that Oxford University has everything needed for the study of war except for posts.

Outlawing war is not enough to promote international peace: The ambivalence of liberal interventionism

Abstract:Why has interstate war declined and why do states refrain from territorial conquests in the post-Second World War order? The 1928 Peace Pact cannot account for these remarkable developments. This article argues that outlawing war is not enough to promote international peace. International Relations debates on the influence of weapons of mass destruction, democratic regime types and political cultures on interstate behaviour provide further important insights into the delegitimation of certain types of war. Since the 1990s, a changing character of war and warfare has emerged that is especially promoted by democratic states. How democratic states have justified their military use of force and how they have conducted their military interventions has a strong and ambivalent impact on the liberal world order.

The Concept of Autonomy and the Changing Character of War

The Concept of Autonomy and the Changing Character of War

Building Competencies for Special Operations Forces’ Readiness in the Gray Zone

Special Operations Forces can be used for policy goals from long-term political influence operations, to engagements taken either to stabilize or dethrone regimes on the basis of U.S. interests. Those actions are taking place more frequently in the Gray Zone, where actors, actions, and areas of engagement merge between traditional interstate relations and nonstate challenges. Many of these contribute to a changing character of war, something that requires adaptable Special Operations Forces to support U.S. national security success. This article looks specifically at ways to ensure Special Operations Forces’ readiness in the Gray Zone across a spectrum of issues and environments. It focuses on educational techniques that rely on tried and tested categories of scholarly analysis to ensure Special Operations Forces’ adaptability in different contexts and to ensure that lessons learned can be applied to commonalities across them.

“Are We Fighting Yet?” Can Traditional Just War Concepts Cope with Contemporary Conflict and the Changing Character of War?

In a time when the clear dividing lines between war and peace are challenged by new techniques and methods of conducting hostilities, it is often difficult to tell if one is in a state of war or not. Even states that do not consider themselves to be ‘at war’ find themselves living under heightened security, with attacks on citizens, economic infrastructure, or way of life being a constant theme. Is this really what peace looks like now? This is not just an academic problem—determining what the context actually is can have profound implications for what one is permitted to do. War is, after all, a situation in which states, and individuals acting on behalf of those states, are permitted to carry out acts that are otherwise prohibited, including the deliberate and premeditated taking of human life. But what normative framework should we apply to guide our responses? The Just War Tradition has provided a framework for thinking about warfare for well over 2,000 years. While the exact details may vary a little, the core ideas are shared across religious and secular culture, underpinning international law. However, should responses to terrorist activity, or ‘hybrid’ attacks, perhaps involving predominantly nonlethal methods such as subversion, cyber, or economic attrition, really be considered within such a framework, when many people would not consider such a context to represent war at all? This paper argues that despite its name, by concentrating on harm in a broader sense rather than its purely lethal manifestation, the type of moral reasoning that the Just War Tradition represents can actually be applied to a much broader set of contexts than might initially be imagined. This means that the Tradition remains a useful guide even when the exact status of the situation may be considered unclear.

Should the Changing Character of War Affect Our Theories of War?

War has changed so much that it barely resembles the paradigmatic cases of armed conflict that just war theories and international humanitarian law seemed to have had in mind even a few decades ago. The changing character of war includes not only the use of new technology such as drones, but probably more problematically the changing temporal and spatial scope of war and the changing character of actors in war. These changes give rise to worries about what counts as war and thus what norms to use in evaluating a particular conflict. In this paper, I develop an argument that the changing character of war gives us reasons to take reductionist revisions of just war theory seriously. By reductionist theories of war I mean those revisions within the just war tradition that suggest that we can use ordinary peacetime interpersonal analyses of moral responsibility and liability to harm to decide what justice requires in times of war.

Heroism and the changing character of war: toward post-heroic warfare? Edited by Sibylle Scheipers

Heroism and the changing character of war: toward post-heroic warfare? Edited by Sibylle Scheipers

Australia

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsJoan BeaumontJoan Beaumont, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, The Australian National University, is author of Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2013) which was in 2014 joint winner of the Prize for Australian History in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and winner of both the New South Wales Premier’s Award for Australian History and the University of Southern Queensland History Book Award in the Queensland Literary Awards. Other recent publications include ‘Remembering the Heroes of Australia’s Wars: From Heroic to Post-Heroic Memory’, in Sibylle Scheipers, ed., Heroism and the Changing Character of War (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 334–38.

Conviction Versus Convention

This collection of essays is centred around the growing concern with the question of whether the laws of war should be changed to reflect the moral status of the combatants involved, or as David Rodin and Henry Shue put it in their introduction, ‘Can a soldier be held responsible for fighting in a war that is illegal or unjust?’ (1). However, there is perhaps a more intriguing question to be found herein. This project, the result of two two-day workshops held at Oxford University’s Programme on the Changing Character of War in the Spring of 2005, has running beneath its aforementioned aim the seemingly meta-theoretical question of whether philosophical theory still has any value in the ‘real world.’ To be more precise, it could be argued that what is really at stake here is whether philosophical arguments about such pressing issues as asymmetric warfare, terrorism, and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan can have any currency in international legal, political, and military debates that demand workable solutions that are more than abstract ideas based on unrealistic hypothetical scenarios. Jeff McMahan’s opening chapter not only initiates this tension between theory and practice, but is itself a microcosm of it. McMahan argues that, while the laws of war must treat all combatants equally regardless of the justness or lack thereof of their side, the ‘morality of war’ cannot disregard justice and therefore cannot treat combatants equally (19). In order to bring our evaluation of combatants into congruence with our evaluation of the everyday use of violence, and thus bring our moral reflections about war into harmony with our ‘basic morality’ (27), McMahan contends that the criterion for liability to harm in war should be changed from ‘posing a threat to others’ (21) to ‘being morally responsible for an unjust threat’ (22). Hence, as McMahan states, since we do not claim that an attacker has a right to defend himself

International Law and the Changing Character of War

International Law and the Changing Character of War

Closing Guantanamo: Is Europe Ready?

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes See, for instance, a letter from Portuguese Foreign Minister Luis Amado on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 10 December 2008, http://www.mne.gov.pt/mne/pt/noticias/200812101640.htm. See, among others, Philippe Sands, Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law (London: Allen Lane, 2008); Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008). It is unclear to what extent European forces in Afghanistan handed over detainees to the United States before 2004–05. Given that US forces were the only ones that had (and have) in-theatre detention facilities, at Bagram airbase and in Kandahar, it seems likely that transfers occurred. Such transfers were probably few, since the ISAF mandate was initially limited to Kabul and European states deployed relatively few troops under the Afghanistan-wide mandate of Operation Enduring Freedom. Amnesty International, Afghanistan – Detainees Transferred to Torture: ISAF Complicity?, 13 November 2007, ASA 11/011/2007, available at http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/473969ab2. html. The same applies to Canada. The US has reportedly also concluded a memorandum of understanding with the Afghan government. Interviews with Legal Advisor, German Ministry of Defence, Bonn, March 2007, and with NATO Legal Advisor, Mons, January 2007. Dick Marty, Alleged Secret Detentions and Unlawful Inter-state Transfers involving Council of Europe Member States (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2006). For the UK case in particular see the documents compiled by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition, http://www.extraordinaryrendition.org/. Relevant legal sources are the Convention Against Torture and, for European states, the European Convention on Human Rights. Paul Koring, ‘Amnesty Slams Canada over Afghan Detainees’, Globe and Mail, 21 February 2007. Phone interview with former Foreign and Commonwealth Office adviser in Helmand, December 2008. See for example Kirk Semple, ‘8 Prisoners Die in Uprising at Afghan Prison’, International Herald Tribune, 5 December 2008. ‘Interpol pushes Afghanistan to record “terrorist” prisoners’, Agence France- Press, 19 September 2008. Nils N. French, ‘The Sarposa Prison Break’, Canadian Army Journal, vol. 11, no. 2, Summer 2008, pp. 8–15. Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau, ‘Afghan Prison Blues’, Newsweek, 11 February 2008. According to German General Hans- Christoph Ammon, head of the German Special Forces, this failure was due to insufficient funding and an inappropriate training approach. Judy Dempsey, ‘German General Breaks Silence on Afghanistan’, International Herald Tribune, 30 November 2008. Poor police training is widely believed to increase the likelihood of torture and ill-treatment. The EU endorses the provision of effective police and judiciary training as one of the core instruments in its efforts to prevent torture in third countries. See Guidelines to EU Policy towards Third Countries on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (Luxembourg: General Affairs Council, 9 April 2001). The Dutch forces seem to work on this assumption as well, since they are reported to transfer detainees only to those Afghan forces that they themselves have trained. See Ashley Deeks, ‘Administrative Detention in Armed Conflict’, Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, vol. 40, no. 3, 2008–2009 (forthcoming). Letter from Portuguese Foreign Minister Luis Amado on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. See Laurel E. Fletcher and Eric Stover, Guantanamo and Its Aftermath: U.S. Detention and Interrogation Practices and Their Impact on Former Detainees (Berkeley, CA: Human Rights Center, 2008). Additional informationNotes on contributorsSibylle ScheipersSibylle Scheipers is Director of Studies, Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War.

Campaign Plans, War Plans and British Defence Policy

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsHew StrachanHew Strachan is Chichele Professor of the History of War, University of Oxford, and Director of the Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War. His latest book is Carl von Clausewitz's ‘On War’: A Biography

Strategy as a Balancing Act

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The Guardian, 30 April 2007. 2. The Guardian, 27 March 2008. 3. John Kiszely, ‘Learning about Counter-Insurgency’, RUSI Journal (Vol. 151, No. 6, December 2006), pp. 16–21. Additional informationNotes on contributorsHew StrachanProfessor Hew Strachan is Chichele Professor of the History of War, University of Oxford, and Director of the Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War. His latest book is Carl von Clausewitz's ‘On War’: A Biography

Disaster Medicine What Is It? Can It Be Taught?

We are all familiar with the disconcerting facts that we prepare for war on the basis of past experience and that the new wars always prove to be quite different. When I was a medical student many years ago, much of the teaching in surgery was "what we learned in the World War." Unfortunately, much of what my professors learned in World War I just was not true, ie, that wounds need frequent dressings and irrigation with sodium hypochlorite solution, that the drafty places in barracks and hospitals caused influenzal pneumonia. However, good lessons can be learned in war. World War II taught us again the sound principles of management of mass casualties, the importance of the proper use of traction splints, and many other things of lasting value. After World War II the American people were especially conscious of danger inherent in the changing character of war. Missiles and