Military Transformation Research Articles

Democratization and Military Transformation in Argentina and Chile: Rethinking Rivalry. By Kristina Mani. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2011. 248p. $65.00.

Democratization and Military Transformation in Argentina and Chile: Rethinking Rivalry. By Kristina Mani. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2011. 248p. $65.00.

Assessing military reform in Indonesia

This article seeks to assess the magnitude of military reform in Indonesia and its impact in establishing greater levels of professionalism within the armed forces. To this end, the authors will offer some reflections on the studies of civil-military relations and military transformation for inculcating a higher degree of military professionalism; analyse to what extent the process of military reform in Indonesia has reshaped the institutional role of the armed forces; and discern three major strategic gaps in Indonesia's military reform, namely the “legal loopholes and regulation vacuum,” the “shortcomings of democratic civilian control,” and the “defence-economic gap.” This article asserts that military professionalism will grow more substantially depending on the ability of civilian elites to exercise effective control over the military and the capacity of the government to transform the military establishment keeping pace with strategic challenges and operational requirements.

Application of Cognitive Load Theory to Develop a Measure of Team Cognitive Efficiency

Improving human systems integration through technologically advanced training and performance aids has become increasingly important to military transformation. Measures of improved cognitive and coordination processes arising from the employment of transformational tools are necessary to guide the refinement and future development of such technologies. In this article, we describe a cognitive load theory approach to developing a combinatory measure of individual workload and team performance following an experimental intervention involving training and a decision support system. We discuss how indicators of what we term team cognitive efficiency can improve assessing the effectiveness of transformational processes and technologies.

Discursive Fields and Military Transformations: Poland and the Baltic States as Legitimate Members of NATO

Despite a wide array of normative statements assuming a yet-to-come homogenization of defence structures of the new members of NATO’s “common strategic culture”, Eastern European members, ten years on, have continued to develop their militaries mostly for territorial defence. Since few (but interesting) qualitative changes in their structures raise questions about the “homogenization” thesis, this article explores the cases of Poland and the three Baltic States. It sheds light on the fact that military reforms in a context of collective security, such as NATO enlargement, are best seen as a materialization of combined discourses of identity representations within a space allowed by the discursive field itself.

Kristina Mani, Democratization and Military Transformation in Argentina and Chile: Rethinking Rivalry (Boulder, CO and London: First Forum Press, 2011), pp. xi+248, $65.00, hb.

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Western Imperialism and Military Reform in Japan and China

This paper compares the initial efforts at military reform in China and Japan in the late nineteenth century. Changes in military organization and training are situated within a global process of military transformation represented by changes in the structure of the Prussian army. The Prussian staff system and planning program were imported into both Japan and China, but with quite different results. The paper contrasts centralization and standardization as typified by the new Japanese army with the decentered approaches in China. The paper argues that although there was substantive change in China, the Qing state was unable to impose a uniform plan for military Westernization. As a result, the new armies were never integrated into a common organization capable of defending the state from external aggression.

The changing role of the military in Turkish politics: democratization through coup plots?

The exposure of alleged coup plots in 2007 has shaken the guardian role of the Turkish military in politics. What were the conditions that led to the exposure of the coups and what is their significance for the future of Turkish democracy? Drawing on insights from southern Europe, the article argues that failed coup plots can lead to democratic civil–military relations especially if they work simultaneously with other facilitating conditions, such as increasing acceptance of democratic attitudes among officers, consensus among civilians over the role of the military, and the influence of external actors, such as the European Union. The article focuses on such domestic and international factors to analyse the transformation of the Turkish military, the splits within the armed forces and the resulting plots. It argues that one positive outcome of the exposed conspiracies in Turkey has been the enactment of new institutional amendments that would eradicate the remaining powers of the military. Yet, a negative outcome of the coup investigations has been an increase in polarization and hostility. Turkish democracy still lacks mutual trust among significant political groups, which creates unfavourable conditions for democratic consolidation.

Ukraine's Maritime Power in the Black Sea—A Terminal Decline?

This article examines why Ukraine has struggled to build an effective and efficient coastal navy able to protect and advance its interests in the Black Sea and beyond. Using the literature on maritime power the argument explores how Ukraine's ability to use the sea has declined significantly over the last five years. It argues that chronic under-funding of Ukraine's ambitious military transformation, recent decisions taken by the government to extend the Russian lease of Sevastopol and to declare its non-aligned status, and ongoing domestic political instability have all damaged Ukraine's maritime power. Dr. Sanders is Senior Lecturer at the Defense Studies Department, King's College London where she is a specialist on the Black Sea region. She has published extensively on Ukraine's military transformation and is currently working on maritime power and maritime security issues in the Black Sea.

Democratization and military transformation in Argentina and Chile: rethinking rivalry

Is there a relationship between the consolidation of democracy and the ending of rivalries with neighboring states? Can internationalist foreign policies be useful in reprogramming militaries to accept civilian authority? Addressing these questions, Kristina Mani examines the dynamic connection between democracy building and security cooperation in Argentina and Chile in the 1990s. Her thoughtful analysis reveals how the international relations of democratizing states are both the product of domestic political goals and a potentially powerful shaper of domestic politics.

The Impact of the US Military Transformation on North Korean Defence Policy

This article presents an interpretation of the US capacity to force North Korea to abandon the development of nuclear weapons, based on the analysis of the conventional balance between the U.S. and North Korea. It is also an attempt to evaluate the impact of the US military transformation on defence policy decisions of the potential opponents of the US. The first (theoretical) part of the article presents the assumptions of theoretical interpretation as well as the fundamentals of evaluating the conventional balance between the US and North Korea. The second part of the article highlights the key moments of the US and the international community’s so far unsuccessful attempts to force North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons and explains the reasons for such unsuccessful policy. The third part of this paper analyzes the conventional balance between the US and North Korea, taking into account the conventional forces of those countries, their longrange conventional strike programmes as well as the missile defence programmes – this analysis presupposes the failure of the US to prevent North Korea from nuclear weapon development.

What Is a Skillful Soldier? An Epistemological Foundation for Understanding Military Skill Acquisition in (Post) Modernized Armed Forces

How do we understand military skill/skills, what is it to be militarily skilled, and how do we acquire military skill/skills? Answering these three questions is essential to understanding the ongoing military transformation of developed Western countries. Universalism and contextualism (two competing ethical/epistemological positions) are used to sketch out a typological framework for explaining how different military paradigms/concepts treat “good” soldiering. Universalism is strongly connected with the traditional military paradigm of static invasion-based defense, while contextualism is connected to flexible expeditionary force-based defenses of the twenty-first century. Transformative changes over the past decade illustrate the value of the contextualist paradigm, suggesting that the universalist paradigm may no longer be useful for a twenty-first century expeditionary force.

US-China Military and Security Developments

Implications for CanadaThe rise of China, foretold for more than a century, brings with it multidimensional repercussions for Canada and the world. Significant changes in the areas of energy, the environment, industry, and trade are taking place against the backdrop of a new security landscape as China's strategic outlook and military power evolve in line with its economic growth and, importantly, as the United States responds to these circumstances. This article examines military and security developments between America and China and assesses their implications for Canada. It begins by highlighting objective advancements in China's military capability, and then identifying - as best as possible, given limited information - the likely intentions and interests behind these military steps. It goes on to outline America's resultant strategic concerns and response, particularly with respect to the north Pacific region. The final section centres on Canada's traditional and developing capabuities and roles in this region, and puts forward some likely implications for Canada of US-China muitary and security developments.CHINA'S MILITARY CAPABILITYThe transformation objectiveMore than a decade into the 21st century, a process of transformation is well underway in aU components of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), including the army, navy, and air force. Broadly conceptualized, this is a muitary transformation taking place along the lines of that instituted by the United States and its western aUies in the decade and a half after the faU of the Berlin WaU, up to and including the Iraq War of 2003. Muitary transformation - known as the revolution in military affairs in the United States in the 1990s - sees that are smaUer in size than their Cold War predecessors; professional or voluntary rather than conscript; equipped with advanced technologies; expeditionary in the sense of able to be deployed and sustained far from home shores; and ague and flexible once on the battlefield, making use of battlefield helicopters and lighter, technologicaUy advanced equipment. Such operate jointly, i.e., army, navy and air force work together, with seamless interoperabuity at a premium. They are everything that a massive, Cold War, in-place conscript army, with designated tasks and operating largely independently from other services, was not.Transformed military make use of advanced intelligence, surveulance, and reconnaissance technologies, notably unmanned aerial vehicles and sateUites, and they can use computers to command, control, communicate, and process intelligence information in near-real time, using high-volume datalinks directed, more often than not, through sateUites. When they apply force, it is precision- guided, whether it is an air- or sealaunched missue, an air-launched bomb, or even a smaUer missue launched from an unmanned combat aerial vehicle. An increased focus on special operations also reflects greater precision in the application of force. This is a smart, rapid-reaction, digitized muitary, and its collective vision - now somewhat out of favour in the west because of the competing and often mutuaUy exclusive demands of counterinsurgency - forms the core of China's goal, stated consistently since 2002, of buuding a modern military based on informatization, that is, the application of information technology to muitary operations.Driven by changed circumstances brought on by the end of the Cold War, military transformation as outlined above was largely achieved in the western world by the middle years of the last decade. But in China the shift has been one step removed. Its transformation has been a response to America's transformation, particularly as exhibited by the precision- guided, information-based warfare of the 1991 Gulf War and, later, NATO's 1999 war in and around Kosovo. The PLA's guiding doctrine, calling for the ability to fight local wars under modern high technology conditions, dates to 1993,1 while the official promulgation of its goal of building informationalized armed forces dates to the years shortly after the Kosovo operation. …

MILITARY TRANSFORMATION IN EUROPE'S NEUTRAL AND NON-ALLIED STATES

Austria, Finland, Sweden and Switzerland share a commitment to military non-alliance as a common Cold War legacy. But divergent threat perceptions and interpretations of neutrality have shaped their subsequent military transformation, leading to co-operation inside the EU and with NATO for most and a focus on homeland defence or domestic tasks for some.

‘Nuestra patria La Habana’: Reading the 1762 British Occupation of the City

This essay explores the 1762 British occupation of Havana. It argues that the military crisis served as a catalyst for the emergence of a discursive space where racial hierarchies were momentarily suspended as residents attempted to make sense of the unfolding events. 1762 thus functions as a window into the military transformations that the city experienced and their effect on race relations in colonial Havana. The descriptions of events and heroes can be understood within the larger process of collective identity-formation that was part of the racially inclusive independista discourses of the nineteenth century.

Military Transformation in the Ottoman Empire and Russia, 1500–1800

Military Transformation in the Ottoman Empire and Russia, 1500–1800 Gábor Ágoston (bio) By the early 16th century, the Ottoman Empire had emerged as a major military power in Southeastern Europe and the Middle East. The Ottomans were feared and admired by contemporaneous Europeans from Niccolò Machiavelli to Ivan Peresvetov. The latter regarded the empire of Sultan Mehmed II (r. 1444–46, 1451–81) as a model to be emulated by his own ruler, Ivan IV of Muscovy (r. 1547–84), and indeed Ottoman (and Islamic, Mongol) methods of resource mobilization and warfare were taken into consideration during the military reforms of Ivan III (r. 1462–1505) and Ivan IV. Yet by 1783, the Ottomans had lost the northern Black Sea littoral and the Crimea, an Ottoman client state with a predominantly Muslim population, to the Russians. Writing his advice to Sultan Mahmud I (r. 1730–54) in 1732, Ibrahim Müteferrika, the founder of the first Arabic-letter printing press in the empire and an ardent proponent of Ottoman reforms, cited the military reforms of Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725) as an example worthy of imitation. Ivan Peresvetov's and Ibrahim Müteferrika's contrasting opinions reflect major shifts in Ottoman and Russian military fortunes, changes that await explanation. Military historians of Central and Eastern Europe have long been obsessed with the European "military revolution" as observed in certain parts of Western Europe and have tried to measure military developments in their regions against those in Western Europe.1 This article argues that comparing and contrasting Ottoman, Austrian Habsburg, Polish-Lithuanian, and Muscovite/Russian military capabilities, performance, and transformations can be just as fruitful as [End Page 281] comparing these empires to those of the leading states of the European military revolution.2 Comparisons of strategies of recruitment and resource mobilization, as well as of bureaucratic–fiscal developments, help us better understand the divergent paths these empires' governments took, and thus the nature of their empires. Such comparisons also help us qualify both the military-revolution approach and its more recent critique that uses cultural arguments. Based ultimately on Weberian assumptions that war acted as a catalyst for political and social change, the military-revolution approach views war "as a force driven by its own internal dynamics of technological developments and organizational innovation," which led to force optimization and thus greater military effectiveness. The cultural argument counters these assumptions with its claim that war ultimately is "culturally determined" and is a product of the cultural context of specific societies. According to this assumption, "the degree to which a technological or organizational innovation is accepted and developed depends upon the cultural context."3 This article is the first attempt at comparing Ottoman and Russian military capabilities from circa 1500 through 1800. My main focus is on military, fiscal, and bureaucratic–institutional transformations and on the changing role of the central government in warmaking. The article pays special attention to the following questions: How did recruitment strategies and methods of resource mobilization change? Were the changes the result of planned reforms or a response to internal and/or external challenges? What causal connections existed between changes in the composition and effectiveness of the armed forces and changes in the relationship between rulers and their elites? Since these questions will ultimately require a monograph or two, the present article's aim is to introduce the questions and give preliminary answers to some of them. The main argument set forth here is that whereas in the patrimonial Ottoman Empire of the 16th century, the sultan and his central government had more control over their empire's resources and the means of organized violence than their Muscovite counterparts, by the 18th century Istanbul lost its edge over St. Petersburg. Despite its failure in the 1711 Pruth campaign, by the early 18th century Russia had considerably strengthened its military capabilities vis-à-vis the Ottomans due to a series of autocratic military, bureaucratic, and [End Page 282] fiscal policies, some of which were devised and implemented as responses to Tatar and Ottoman threats or introduced as imitations of Ottoman military–bureaucratic practices. In this process, Romanov Russia evolved into an autocratic centralized empire, described...

Czech Military Transformation: Towards Military Typical of Consolidated Democracy?

The new security challenges began to be emphasized in Czech strategic documents as early as the beginning of the 1990s. As a result, the Czech Army has been undergoing its radial and essentially continuous transformation since the beginning of its existence in 1993. The elimination of these threats became an important task for the Czech military. In contrast with the situation in the other armies of consolidated democracies, the ideal of the military professional has not changed much in the Czech Republic. It still is a combination of a warrior, technician, and manager. In 1989–92, there were some processes taking place in Czechoslovakia in the area of civil-military relations that, in many respects, differed from the development in Western Europe. The most important of these was the process of the de-politicization of the army in the sense of freeing it from Communist Party influence and control.

Los ejes de la política de defensa estadounidense en la posguerra fría

El artículo estudia la Revolución Americana en los Asuntos Militares, eje del planeamiento estratégico estadounidense de la inmediata posguerra fría, promotora de su proceso de Transformación militar y responsable de los logros iniciales y de los fracasos posteriores en las largas campañas de Afganistán e Irak.

Entkernt sich der Leviathan?

Since the 1990s, changes in the area of security have triggered a number of ongoing military transformations in keeping with the broad trends of internationalization and privatization we currently experience. We compare two concrete transformation processes in liberal democracies to assess their effects on the state security and defence policy, namely, reform of the German armed forces into an ‘army of operations’ and increased contracting of private military and security companies by the US military. Contrary to what might be expected, neither privatization nor internationalization directly undermine or weaken the state’s monopoly on the use of force. However, under the guise of a discourse on efficiency and effectiveness, internationalization and privatization have the joint effect of weakening democratic and legal control over the state’s monopoly of the use of force, in the long run.

Transformation of America's Military and Asymmetric War

In the post–Cold War and post–9/11 era, the need for broadening the focus of military transformation to include asymmetric warfare capabilities has been given lip service. The U.S. military did not feel the necessity to widen the scope, if not to change the focus, of transformation to include asymmetric warfare until 2003 and 2004. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Iraqi insurgency emerged as a potent force. It was only then that the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps deemed it vital to come up with a new doctrine, which was to become the chief driver for America's asymmetric war against terrorism and the insurgency in Iraq. Since politics remain central to the resolution of an asymmetric conflict, the U.S. military is likely to become involved in quagmire-like situations in future warfare of this nature. That is true in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

A Long-Term Counterinsurgency Strategy

The rapid, decisive campaign conducted against the Taliban by US Operations Forces (SOF) in conjunction with the Northern Alliance and supported by US airpower in the opening phases of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) captured the attention of military professionals throughout the world--allies and potential adversaries alike. Heralded as a template for future military transformation by the most enthusiastic proponents, even the less sanguine observers were forced to acknowledge an impressive synergy and economy of force in the SOF and airpower combination. Nearly eight years later, former International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) Commander, General Stanley McChrystal, issued a tactical directive seeking, among other things, to limit the use of Close Air Support (CAS) by NATO forces in Afghanistan. (1) This action followed several high-profile incidences of collateral damage caused by air strikes in support of ISAF forces and signaled a broader shift in theater strategy toward a counterinsurgency (COIN) centric approach similar to that successfully employed in conjunction with the surge in Iraq. While comparisons are inevitable, such a strategy needs to address significant additional challenges posed by the unique cultural and geographical characteristics of Afghanistan which could in effect make the restriction of airpower as much a danger to the achievement of strategic objectives as the collateral damage that it seeks to avoid. One prominent dilemma is the central role that SOF continues to play in performing many key strategic functions, such as counterterrorism (CT) and counterinsurgency operations. There is a paradox posed by the fact that the characteristics, which render SOF an ideal choice for Afghanistan's dispersed and geographically isolated rural insurgency, also engender increased reliance upon the mobility, responsiveness, and firepower provided by airpower. This article will examine the unique suitability of SOF to meet strategic objectives in Afghanistan, explore the synergistic relationship between SOF and airpower, and assess the strategic utility of this combat-proven combination in an irregular warfare environment. Putting the Special in Operations Operations Forces share a number of uniquely defining qualities which distinguish them from their conventional counterparts. Despite a broad consensus that SOF have a distinct military culture with distinctive capabilities, no universally accepted, definitive work exists codifying the character of special operations. There is, however, a substantial amount of published material on the subject. This article is an attempt to construct a platform for further analysis by synthesizing the key elements of several notable contemporary special operations theorists. Adaptability, Flexibility, and Versatility In his analysis of the decisive characteristics of SOF following the now iconic tactical and operational successes of US SOF teamed with the Northern Alliance over Taliban forces in late 2001 and early 2002, Colonel John Jogerst notes You don't know what you need until you need it. A wide range of capabilities in effective quantities is a good hedge against tomorrow's threat. (2) Admiral Eric T. Olsen, Commander, United States Operations Command (USSOCOM), similarly posits: We need to be responsive enough to adjust rapidly to what the enemy throws at us, and we need to have the agility to transcend the spectrum of conflict. (3) Colin Gray affirms the innovative nature of special operations, further noting that successful SOF units such as the British Air Service have institutionalized the ability to reinvent themselves as national security interests require. (4) Building upon Gray's work, Australian Squadron Leader David Jeffcoat identifies unorthodox means as one of his proposed characteristics of SOF, which are required to adapt their approach to each operation and come up 'with a distinctive theory of victory. …