Ongoing Military Research Articles

Inside Afghanistan 23 Years after the Soviet Withdrawal

Twenty-three years have passed since the Soviet Union withdrew its forces from Afghanistan and, after 11 years of the United States’ (US) military involvement in that country, the war between Afghan insurgent groups and the US-led coalition forces is raging with no side winning. More than 11 years later, Afghanistan remains divided and ethnic tensions are worsening. If the ongoing military, political and economic policies in Afghanistan continue and Pakistan remains a safe haven for Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the future may soon drastically tilt against the ineffective and corrupt Afghan government and its foreign supporters. This study is mainly based upon 33 years of observations, in-depth interviews with Afghans in their local languages and an extensive study of recent developments inside Afghanistan and its neighboring countries, especially Pakistan and Iran.

Trends in Thinking about Warfare

Militaries the world over need to study and understand lessons from the ongoing military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon, and the new knowledge needs to be placed in context. Neglected military history itself provides enduring lessons. This article attempts to capture the trends and debates in the understanding of current warfare and outlines how lessons of war are interpreted with a focus on future trends in war-fighting. The article concludes with some policy suggestions and areas for further inquiry.

Sustaining the Fight: A Cross-Sectional Time-Series Analysis of Public Support for Ongoing Military Interventions

What determines a democratic public's willingness to tolerate the human and material costs of sustaining ongoing military operations to victory? Athough much literature has addressed the factors that affect public attitudes toward the use of military force, few studies adopt either a theoretical perspective or a research method explicitly designed to answer this question. In particular, existing research tends to focus on the costs of war fighting, while ignoring both the tangible and intangible costs of withdrawing from a foreign military engagement. I argue that many of the factors that the public uses to estimate the cost of prosecuting a war—troop strength requirements, whether or not troops are engaged in ground combat and, most importantly, casualties—are also measures of the extent of a state's commitment to achieving its war aims. If the public treats the cost of the state's military commitment simply as an expense , support for sustaining an operation should decrease as the cost of commitment increases. If, however, citizens have a tendency to see military commitments as investments that put the country's reputation on the line or can only be redeemed if the state is victorious in the war, an increase in commitment could actually strengthen the public's determination to sustain the fight. Employing a cross-sectional time-series design with data from 12 U.S. and British military interventions, I explore whether the costs of continuing to prosecute a war or the costs of withdrawing have a greater effect on public willingness to sustain ongoing military operations. The results suggest that public concern about the costs of withdrawing from a conflict can be a more important determinant of willingness to persevere than sensitivity to the costs of war fighting. As a result, there is a considerable disconnect between what the public claims it would support in hypothetical scenarios and the types of military operations the public actually shows a willingness to sustain once they are underway.

Document & Media Exploitation

A computer used by Al Qaeda ends up in the hands of a Wall Street Journal reporter. A laptop from Iran is discovered that contains details of that country’s nuclear weapons program. Photographs and videos are downloaded from terrorist Web sites. As evidenced by these and countless other cases, digital documents and storage devices hold the key to many ongoing military and criminal investigations. The most straightforward approach to using these media and documents is to explore them with ordinary tools—open the word files with Microsoft Word, view the Web pages with Internet Explorer, and so on.

Does the First Amendment's Freedom of the Press Clause Place the Institutional Media Above the Law of Classified Secrets?

Testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, contending that Section 798 of the Espionage Act, prohibiting the publication of classified information regarding U.S. communications capabilities, can constitutionally be applied to the media, for several reasons: 1) A majority of the Justices in the Pentagon Papers case recognized that prior restraints on publication of highly sensitive, classified information regarding ongoing military and communications operations would be permissible; 2) The prospect of post-publication liability for violating the Espionage Act was also recognized by a majority of the Justices; and 3) The Freedom of Press Clause of the First Amendment is equally applicable to citizens and the institutional media.

Kosovo and the Metaphor War

In the spring of 1999, American political leaders debated how to respond to the ongoing military and humanitarian crisis in the Kosovo region of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, where armed Serbs under the control of thenYugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic appeared to be conducting an ethnic cleansing campaign against the province’s predominantly Albanian population. Six months earlier in the fall of 1998, the Yugoslav army had forced members

The Aouzou Strip Dispute—A Legal Analysis

The outbreak of further hostilities between Chad and Libya in August 1987 was occasioned by a dispute concerning sovereignty over the so-called Aouzou Strip in northern Chad. The extent of Libyan involvement in Chad is motivated to a large degree by this territorial claim. This dispute must be distinguished from Libya's wider ambitions for Arab unity or its involvement in Chad's civil war, although it would appear true to say that Libya was thereby seeking to consolidate its hold on the Aouzou Strip. Documentary evidence exists to support the contention that a genuine territorial claim exists. In addition, it is interesting to note that, while Libya appeared to have resigned itself to the victory of President Habre's forces in the civil war and the defeat and expulsion of its forces from the rest of Chad in the early part of 1987, the capture of Aouzou by Habre's forces in August 1987 resulted in an ongoing military response brought to a tentative conclusion in September 1987 by the OAU. Colonel Gadafi has been reported as saying that, if Chad ceded the Aouzou Strip, he would regard the war as over and would never again interfere in Chad's internal affairs. Moreover, Colonel Gadafi's support for the rival factions in Chad has wavered according to their position on the question of the Aouzou Strip. The purpose of this short article is to analyse Libya's territorial claim to the disputed territory.