Since the start of the twenty-first century, military contractors such as Blackwater (now named Academi), Kellogg, Brown & Root, and SNC Lavalin have become household names in many countries. The reasons for their prominence vary from case to case. One is notoriety. Particular firms hold contracts valued in the millions if not billions of dollars,…
Tag: United States
Roundtable 7-14 on The Pathologies of Power: Fear, Honor, Glory, and Hubris in U.S. Foreign Policy
Why did the United States, despite vigorous public debates over the wisdom of invading Iraq, pursue an ultimately disastrous war with Iraq in 2003? After all, as John Stuart Mill and others have suggested, such debates in the ‘marketplace of ideas’ should surely have led to a solid consensus against such a course. Explaining why…
Review Essay 27 on The Good War: Why We Couldn’t Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistan
The Good War: Why We Couldn’t Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistan is aptly named and sure to find its lasting place as the first full narrative of the U.S.-led intervention from 2001 through 2014. The timeframe is something of a moving target, depending on where you begin and end, and the theme…
Roundtable 7-13 on The Great Powers and the International System Systemic Theory in Empirical Perspective
It is difficult for me to imagine an international relations (IR) scholar not being interested enough in Bear Braumoeller’s The Great Powers and the International System to read this review symposium. I’ll warrant that I’m biased on the matter, having been nurtured on systemic IR theory as an undergraduate and graduate student, liking books that…
Forum 5 on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) Report and the United States’ Post-9/11 Policy on Torture
It should not be surprising that the long awaited release in December 2014 of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) Report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation did not bring a conclusive end to the debate over the use of torture or enhanced interrogation techniques by the United States.[1] To be sure, John Brennan,…
Article Review 33 on “Zero dark squared: Does the US benefit from more Special Operations Forces?”
Recently, there has been a spate of books dealing with the issue of strategy and its utility. Lawrence Freedman, Colin Gray, Hew Strachan, and Hal Brands have all weighed in with recent works on the tensions between what strategic theory discusses and the practical difficulties in achieving successful results through its use.[1] The growing attention…
Forum 4 on “An INS Special Forum: Implications of the Snowden Leaks”
From the very beginning of the nation’s history, intelligence has been set aside as a conspicuous exception to James Madison’s advocacy of checks-and-balances, spelled out in his Federalist Paper No. 51. The ‘auxiliary precautions’ that this key participant at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 (and later America’s fourth President) — the safeguards he had helped…
Article Review 32 on “On Domains: Cyber and the Practice of Warfare.”
Over the last few decades one of the hottest subjects of debate in the social sciences has been the emergence of ‘cyber’ and its effects on all manner of social relationships and human communities.[1] The term itself is chronically contested and the understanding of the nature of cyberspace in the literature (i.e., its delimitation, composition,…
Article Review 31 on “The India−Pakistan Rivalry and Failure in Afghanistan.”
In a timely article, John Mitton seeks to show how the enduring rivalry between India and Pakistan has hampered NATO’s efforts in Afghanistan and contributed to its failure. The author is careful in noting that while the rivalry is not the only reason for failure, it certainly is a factor. The author also cites many…
Roundtable 7-9, The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World
In Charles Tilly’s oft-cited formulation, “War made the state, and the state made war.”[1] In other words, the relationship between insecurity and state capacity is a direct one. As was the case in Europe, the need to fight wars caused states to develop economically and build strong state capacity, which led to the modern state….