Droning on about civilian casualty ratios

by Jack McDonald 3 April 2012

I have been busy with statistics on the UAV strikes in Pakistan and have come up with the following: between 2004 and 2011, the ballpark figure for the estimated civilian-combatant* casualty ratio is somewhere between 1:4 and 1:5. Torturing the New America Foundation’s figures to breaking point results in an outside ratio of about 1:3. [...]

18 comments Read more →

Fear of an electronic planet

by Jack McDonald 3 April 2012

Tim Stevens has written a quick piece over on his blog about the popular confusion between ‘cyberwar’ and ‘drones’. Since Tim is researching concepts associated with cyber warfare and I am researching bits and bobs associated with drones, we often find ourselves rolling our eyes at the same pieces of mis-informed commentary. For some reason, [...]

2 comments Read more →

Chucking dice at complexity

by Jack McDonald 29 March 2012

Complexity is now a big thing in military affairs, what with effects based operations and all. It is, in my mind, possibly the most banal appropriation of scientific language of the past decade. With apologies to the author for singling him out, here’s an example of the banality of complex war: Complex environments lead to [...]

12 comments Read more →

Democracy protects us against Peter Cruddas and Cash for Suggestions

by Francis Grice 27 March 2012

This week’s furor about Peter Cruddas, co-treasurer of the Conservative Party, offering the opportunity to suggest policies in exchange for cash is unlikely to die down for quite some time. But I’d like to play devil’s advocate for a moment and propose a (possibly slightly far fetched) counterpoint: why shouldn’t we let parties accept policy suggestions in [...]

2 comments Read more →

Online Attribution of the French Killer

by Clement Guitton 26 March 2012

Mohammed Merah, the culprit of the killing of 7 people in France last week, was found using a mix of traditional and online forensics. This case highlights that online attribution/identification is possible with a sound Internet governance model, but it also raises a few questions. On Sunday 11 March, a military official, Imad Ibn Ziaten, [...]

0 comments Read more →

Looking for Mr. Z: From a National to a Military Strategy

by Jill Sargent Russell 23 March 2012

I did my first studies of United States Foreign Policy and Diplomatic History at the Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna. This is a critical fact in my scholarly background: SAIS was the Cold War International Relations school. Both the Washington, DC, and Bologna, Italy, centers were founded to serve American foreign policy needs at [...]

5 comments Read more →

Sisyphus and his rock, Volume something or other, ‘The Afghan Variant’

by David Betz 21 March 2012

My friend and former student Ryan Evans has penned a new piece over at Foreign Policy on Afghanistan ‘Mission Can’t Complete‘. I think it’s worth a read. If you’re stuck for time, however, here’s a handy summary in the form of a picture.        

2 comments Read more →

Strategy and time

by Kenneth Payne 20 March 2012

I’m just dashing off a short article, spinning off a chapter in the book I’m writing. In turn, here’s a short post about the short article. Work it baby! Strategy, I contend, is inherently about making judgments in time. We seek to use violence instrumentally to reach some desired future state. And we are guided by [...]

8 comments Read more →

Rabbits, airborne.

by Jack McDonald 14 March 2012

There was an interesting piece on Radio Four earlier regarding the effects of a strategy shift on the part of animal rights protestors. Since handing out images of animal testing outside Tesco wasn’t doing the job, and threatening scientists was, err, getting them jailed, they’ve now started on pressurising companies. Specifically, they’ve been pressurising big [...]

19 comments Read more →

Syria and Bosnia.. a partial echo from history

by Rob Dover 12 March 2012

It’s difficult to write about a civil war at its start. The accounts are confused and conflicting. The international rhetoric is stretched and obtuse. The claims and counter-claims are the stuff of the playground; the vociferous voices vying for some kind of international validation. Oh, and the UN is once again being hopeless. I might still be [...]

2 comments Read more →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →