28 March 2008

INTERNATIONAL SECURITY

Murray, Williamson WAR AND THE WEST (Orbis, vol. 52, no. 2, Spring 2008, pp. 348-356)

Williamson, Professor Emeritus at Ohio State University, writes that the outline of human history over the last two thousand years is framed by armed conflict. The West now enjoys the product of several developments in political and social domains culminating in what can be called a Military Revolution. The creation of powerful states as the overarching social organization is an example of one such revolution, which supported a series of smaller innovations and changes in the way the West fought its wars. The author asserts history reveals the degree of political, social, economic and technological adaptation needed to minimize the consequences of failure. He believes that the study of history is necessary to insure that we do not have to fight wars more often, or at far higher cost in human terms.

Tidd, John FROM REVOLUTION TO REFORM: A BRIEF HISTORY OF U.S. INTELLIGENCE (SAIS Review, vol. 28, no. 1, Winter/Spring 2008, pp. 5-24)

The author, lecturer at the School of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Arizona, notes that a network of large, permanent intelligence-gathering organizations has been a feature of U.S. government only since World War II. During the Revolutionary War and into the first half of the nineteenth century, intelligence activity was very limited; Tidd charts the uneven growth of U.S. intelligence organizations from the Civil War until World War I. It was the Second World War, followed by the Cold War, that saw an explosive growth in intelligence-gathering. This is one of a series of articles in SPIES, an issue of the SAIS Review devoted to the role of intelligence in U.S. policymaking and the unprecedented challenges the U.S. intelligence community is facing today.

(DDD) Umansky, Eric LOST OVER IRAN (Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 2008, pp. 26-30)

The author, contributing editor to CJR, writes that the National Intelligence Estimate of December 2007 that concluded that Iran had frozen its nuclear weaponization program back in 2003 came as a shock to the U.S. media, which had asked few questions about administration claims that Iran was not far away from building nuclear weapons. The U.S. received more help from the Iranians than anyone else in its campaign to root out al-Qaeda from Afghanistan. Soon after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Iran made an offer that “put nearly everything on the table”, writes the author, from support for Hezbollah to the nuclear-energy program. The overtures received very little publicity, as Iranian officials did not want to be seen publicly making peace offerings to Washington. Umansky believes that “there does appear to have been an opportunity for equilibrium that, with little notice in the media, was passed up not by Iran but by the Bush administration.”

Williams, John Allen THE MILITARY AND SOCIETY BEYOND THE POSTMODERN ERA (Orbis, vol. 52, no. 2, Spring 2008, pp. 197-216)

Williams, professor of political science at Loyola University, Chicago, notes that there are new security challenges resulting from the Sept. 11 attacks and there is a renewed focus on the military's role in defending U.S. interests and homeland. As a result, U.S. military forces (and perhaps in the West generally) are evolving from their Cold War and immediate post-Cold War perspectives to confront transnational and sub-national non-state dangers. These changes have significant implications for military professionalism and the relations between the military and society. The author puts these changes into a wider theoretical context, and modifies the “Postmodern Military” model, as the “Hybrid” model. Williams updates it to reflect changes in the threat and civil-military relations in the United States as well as in other countries.