HAMAS Media in Gaza: Still Audible?
January 2, 2024
A notable gap—in all the recent coverage of Gaza—is news about HAMAS media organs of the most traditional types: radio and TV. It seems likely that their studios in Gaza City are rubble heaps; it seems just as likely that some service airs at some times from hidden locations, mobile transmitters, webpages, or foreign host sites. No one seems to be asking. There is of course interest in social media; there have been informative articles on HAMAS accounts, as on Telegram, the company a Russian exile runs from a well-settled base in Dubai.
A War Studies Classic
October 2, 2023
This year we are seeing the refurbishment of a classic in war studies and military history. There is a new edition of the book Makers of Modern Strategy.
As a guide through our IWP course # 628 on “Military Strategy,” I have been excited to examine the new volume of May 2023 and inquire into what it does (or does not do) for the wider scholarly communities of security studies, great power rivalry, low intensity conflict, modern history, and so on. The conclusion: it’s indeed valuable, even if it will not “replace” the last edition, which has its own virtues and special perspectives.
The Books That Churchill Read: The self-education of a statesman
May 24, 2022
Winston Spencer Churchill wrote with warmth and humor about his early education — and its limits. Certain passages had a touch of the tremulous, given the discipline to which he was subjected by one or two nasty schoolmasters. Biographers have shown interest in the relevant pages of My Early Life (1930), that winning autobiography. But not there, nor anywhere else, is there a published accounting of all the books the young man read. It is natural to be intrigued: What printed works helped prepare Churchill for all the ministerial posts he held before age 40, without ever attending college, let alone graduate school? What elements of education played into developing that sparkling personality and precocious worldly view? What was the intellectual evolution of this writer destined for a Nobel Prize in Literature?
A Disturbing Parallel: Putin’s aggression and German actions in the late 1930s
Jan 28, 2022
Below is the transcript of a video that IWP professor Dr. Christopher C. Harmon did for the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare at Marine Corps University, where he is a Distinguished Fellow.
There is value in thinking along historical parallels. And there can be a little danger in a parallel drawn artificially. In Vladimir Putin’s decade of aggression against the Ukrainian people, I see a limited but instructive historical parallel with German actions against neighbors in the late 1930s.
The Timing of Terrorism: The Obsessions with Dates
September 27, 2021
This month is the black anniversary of September 11, 2001. It has many meanings for us, but was that date in particular selected by Al Qaeda? A few suggest there is a link to the last day of battle in 1683 at the gates of Vienna, a titanic Moslem-Christian struggle for western Europe. Americans might also wonder whether 9/11—numbers that cry “emergency” to this country—were a clever choice by the terrorists as psychological warfare.
Innovation and Historical Continuity in Great Power Competition
October 29, 2019
Even in this age of remarkable changes, the character of warfare and the continuities of geography and politics are weighty and instructive. Politicians and strategists often relearn the most fundamental lessons about these continuities. It is thus no surprise that the current security establishment in China is infatuated with the writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the American naval power theorist who died in 1914.
Iran as Competitor: Measured, Violent, Relentless
May 20, 2019
In April the United States government imposed new sanctions on a large, well-functioning segment of state power and governance of Iran: the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Iran is of course a long-time rival power to the United States in the Middle East, and it is a terrorism sponsor-the worst in the world, according to our State Department. So this intensified focus on the Guards Corps is due to its roles in illegal violence abroad. But this is also the latest chapter in a lengthy, difficult testament of troubles between the two states.
How Do We Learn?
January 31, 2019
How do we learn?
How is it that we anticipate a coming threat, so as to understand and meet it?
Unusually, the danger may be new. The Internet was revolutionary, so cyber attack is largely a new threat to us. It cannot be met by hiring more postal inspectors but must be considered and defeated by other experts – many quite young — in very arcane and technical fields. That is true even though collective response may also be shaped by senior leaders and thinkers whose experience with traditional strategy problems is far longer.
Remembering 23 October
November 29, 2013
The 23rd of October, which falls on a Wednesday this year, signals the 30th anniversary of one of the most significant dual-bombings in the history of low-intensity conflict. Soldiers of France and the United States, dispatched to Lebanon to keep peace amidst its civil war, were destroyed in great numbers by vehicle bombs driven into their two residences.
Spain’s ETA Terrorist Group is Dying
November 1, 2012
The armed organization “Basque Fatherland & Liberty” undertook a struggle for an independent homeland vis-à-vis Spanish central government over half a century ago. But today, the author argues, the ETA appears doomed for three reasons. First, Spanish statesmen of the late 1970s agreed to limited autonomy for Basque-dominated provinces, and over time this undermined militancy. Second, Paris has become a strong partner to Madrid in pursuing ETA members—who once could hide readily amidst French Basques.
On Strategic Thinking: Patterns in Modern History
March 14, 2012
Strategy is the organization and application of power—especially military power—to achieve national policy objectives. Because it is not an exact science, strategy has a “history” only in inexact ways: there has been continual change but little that resembles true development in strategy. Strategy is part art as well as part science. And like painting, the art to which Winston Churchill compared it, strategy has moved through time less along a line of development than in angles, curves, and loops.
Anarchism & Fire in London: A Centenary
December 16, 2010
In London, one hundred years ago, on the weekday morning of 3 January, citizens awoke amidst “The Siege of Sidney Street.”
Well-armed Anarchists tried to rob a jeweler, murdered police who responded, and then disappeared within the city. Located in an apartment building after two weeks, they were now surrounded by Metropolitan Police massed on scene. And Home Office Minister Winston Churchill replied favorably to a request for an Army platoon from the Tower of London to support the cops.
Illustrations of Discrete Uses of Force in Counterterrorism
July 1, 2010
In 1901, an insurrection in the Philippines Islands brought prominence to a talented but relatively inexperienced general of U.S. Army volunteers, Frederick Funston. He demonstrated that good intelligence and deception were still as valuable as when the Chinese commander Sun Tzu called them the very essence of war some 2400 years earlier.
Propaganda at pistol point: The use and abuse of education by leftist terrorists
May 4, 2010
The common tendency to speak and write of terrorists as “mindless,” and to either dismiss or dread them accordingly, is inappropriate. Many leftist extremists are deadly serious about their ideas. Most group leaders of the last three decades have been college‐educated at a minimum; many have professional backgrounds as teachers, college professors, writers, lawyers, and doctors. This sociopolitical reality suggests two questions for reflection: (1) what have been the effects of education upon leftist terrorists, and (2) how have terrorists used their schooling and their credentials to advance their enterprises?
Public diplomacy’s next challenge
March 17, 2008
Despite seven years of experiments, U.S. public diplomacy against international terrorism has largely failed. What is most needed is a strong infusion of fresh ideas. The rhetorical branch of the offensive against terror has been utterly neglected. U.S. spokesmen should re-open the argument about terrorism’s rank immorality; amplify the voices of Muslim critics of terrorism; publicly deconstruct the ideas of outspoken terrorists; and point to such weaknesses as their lack of credentials in theology. Secondly, there is much room for vigorous and thoughtful defense of evident political alternatives to terror, especially moderation and the rule of law.
How al-Qaeda may end: History shows us how to win
How do terrorist groups end? This question is well worth considering in this third year of war with al-Qaeda and the larger “militant Moslem international.”
Work in Common: Democracies and Opposition to Terrorism
July 1, 2002
One of the finest of the world’s declarations, in the wake of 11 September, came from Minister M. Shameem Ahsan, speaking for Bangladesh in the United Nations General Assembly. He treated this tragedy with sensitivity and intelligence. He looked to UN principles to give “global legitimacy” to the struggle against terrorism. He supported Security Council efforts to bring justice to the perpetrators-indeed, he argued that absence of punishment would mean future dangers to innocent civilians. The Minister then took note of how 60 countries lost citizens in the carnage of that day. Sixty countries, including Bangladesh.[2]
‘Are We Beasts’ Churchill And The Moral Question Of World War II ‘Area Bombing’
December 1, 1991
This historical reassessment of the World War II British bombing campaign notes that though in 1940 Churchill declared that he was waging “a military and not a civilian war” to destroy “military objectives” and not “women and children,” within eighteen months both types of targets would be struck by Bomber Command. The author searches for the reasons in “three contiguous realms” of strategic influence: moral (and legal), political, and military. The study concludes that although for much of the war “area bombing” of cities was a “tragic necessity” meeting the “reasonable man’s standard of what was decently allowable given the blunt weapons the Allies had” and the evils faced, nonetheless Allied leaders could have and should have abandoned indiscriminate bombing in the last phases of the conflict, when more precise means were at hand and “Nazi power had been overmatched.”