Threat Assessment
Who Lost Vietnam?: Soldiers, Civilians, and U.S. Military Strategy
James McAllister
International Security, Winter 2010/11, Pages 95-123
Abstract:
Scholars have long argued about why the United States pursued a conventional military strategy during the Vietnam War rather than one based on counterinsurgency principles. A recent article in this journal by Jonathan Caverley presents a bold challenge to the historiography of the Vietnam War. Rejecting the standard historical focus on the organizational culture and strategic perspective of Gen. William Westmoreland and the U.S. Army, Caverley argues that the roots of the United States' strategy in Vietnam can be traced to the direct influence of civilian leaders and the strong constraint of public opinion. Caverley's main arguments are a welcome challenge to the established wisdom, but they are not supported by the historical evidence. Civilian officials in Lyndon Johnson's administration did not instruct the military on how to fight the ground war within the borders of South Vietnam. Westmoreland did not want to change U.S. military strategy to focus on pacification at the expense of search and destroy tactics and the main force war. Both U.S. civilian and military officials were convinced that counterinsurgency was a South Vietnamese responsibility that U.S. ground forces should not assume. Public opinion was a weak, rather than a strong, constraint on the specific decisions of the Johnson administration during the pivotal years of the Vietnam War. Democracies may not be able to win certain counterinsurgency conflicts, but the primary source of this failure is not a civilian aversion to casualties.
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Sacred values and conflict over Iran's nuclear program
Morteza Dehghani et al.
Judgment and Decision Making, December 2010, Pages 540-546
Abstract:
Conflict over Iran's nuclear program, which involves a US-led policy to impose sanctions on Iran, is perceived by each side as a preeminent challenge to its own national security and global peace. Yet, there is little scientific study or understanding of how material incentives and disincentives, such as economic sanctions, psychologically affect the targeted population and potentially influence behaviour. Here we explore the Iranian nuclear program within a paradigm concerned with sacred values. We integrate experiments within a survey of 1997 Iranians. We find that a relatively small but politically significant portion of the Iranian population believes that acquiring nuclear energy has become a sacred value, in the sense that proposed economic incentives and disincentives result in a "backfire effect" in which offers of material rewards or punishment lead to increased anger and greater disapproval. This pattern was specific to nuclear energy and did not hold for acquiring nuclear weapons. The present study is the first demonstration of the backfire effect for material disincentives as well as incentives, and on an issue whose apparent sacred nature is recent rather than longstanding.
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Laura DiGrande et al.
American Journal of Epidemiology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were the largest human-made disaster in US history, there is little extant research documenting the attacks' consequences among those most directly affected, that is, persons who were in the World Trade Center towers. Data from a cross-sectional survey conducted 2-3 years after the attacks ascertained the prevalence of long-term, disaster-related posttraumatic stress symptoms and probable posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in 3,271 civilians who evacuated World Trade Center towers 1 and 2. Overall, 95.6% of survivors reported at least 1 current posttraumatic stress symptom. The authors estimated the probable rate of PTSD at 15.0% by using the PTSD Checklist. Women and minorities were at an increased risk of PTSD. A strong inverse relation with annual income was observed. Five characteristics of direct exposure to the terrorist attacks independently predicted PTSD: being on a high floor in the towers, initiating evacuation late, being caught in the dust cloud that resulted from the tower collapses, personally witnessing horror, and sustaining an injury. Working for an employer that sustained fatalities also increased risk. Each addition of an experience of direct exposure resulted in a 2-fold increase in the risk of PTSD (odds ratio = 2.09, 95% confidence interval: 1.84, 2.36). Identification of these risk factors may be useful when screening survivors of large-scale terrorist events for long-term psychological sequelae.
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Still an American? Mortality Salience and Treatment of Suspected Terrorists
Matthew Kugler & Joel Cooper
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, December 2010, Pages 3130-3147
Abstract:
In today's post-9/11 world, it is important to consider the psychological factors related to beliefs about the proper treatment of those suspected of terrorist involvement. We report 2 experiments on the impact of mortality salience on people's willingness to deny procedural protections to terror suspects. Reminders of mortality led participants to extend more procedural protections to an American terrorism suspect, but fewer toward a Saudi Arabian. In Study 2, we replicated and extended the results of Study 1 by showing that support of extreme interrogation measures was specific to members of enemy out-groups (e.g., Saudis), as opposed to non-enemy out-groups (e.g., Bulgarians). The results are discussed in terms of terror-management theory.
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Does Terrorism Demoralize? Evidence from Israel
Dmitri Romanov, Asaf Zussman & Noam Zussman
Economica, forthcoming
Abstract:
Terrorism is a form of warfare that is specifically designed to have far-reaching psychological effects beyond the immediate victims. We study the effect of terrorism on the happiness of Israelis during a recent period of severe violence with the Palestinians (the second Intifada). The identification strategy is based on variation in the intensity of terrorism over time and location. Using individual level happiness equations augmented with daily fatality figures, we show that terrorism had practically no immediate or delayed effect on the happiness of Jewish Israelis, but adversely affected the happiness of Arab citizens of Israel.
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Grand Strategy and the Graveyard of Assumptions: Britain and Afghanistan, 1839-1919
Christian Tripodi
Journal of Strategic Studies, October 2010, Pages 701-725
Abstract:
This article comprises a reply to those who seek to use the British historical experience in Afghanistan in order to draw parallels with current operations in that country. It argues that, while the conceptual and physical response to the issue of Afghanistan on the part of Empire policy-makers during the period 1839-1919 was characterised by periods of indecision and mistaken assumptions, their grasp of strategic principles allowed the formulation of a series of Afghan policies that would serve to protect and indeed enhance British interests in the region for over a century and which stand in stark contrast to the seemingly incoherent Afghan strategy articulated by the current British government.
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The Rise of Muslim Foreign Fighters: Islam and the Globalization of Jihad
Thomas Hegghammer
International Security, Winter 2010/11, Pages 53-94
Abstract:
Why has transnational war volunteering increased so dramatically in the Muslim world since 1980? Standard explanations, which emphasize U.S.-Saudi support for the 1980s Afghan mujahideen, the growth of Islamism, or the spread of Wahhabism are insufficient. The increase in transnational war volunteering is better explained as the product of a pan-Islamic identity movement that grew strong in the 1970s Arab world from elite competition among exiled Islamists in international Islamic organizations and Muslim regimes. Seeking political relevance and increased budgets, Hijaz-based international activists propagated an alarmist discourse about external threats to the Muslim nation and established a global network of Islamic charities. This "soft" pan-Islamic discourse and network enabled Arabs invested in the 1980s Afghanistan war to recruit fighters in the name of inter-Muslim solidarity. The Arab-Afghan mobilization in turn produced a foreign fighter movement that still exists today, as a phenomenon partly distinct from al-Qaida. The analysis relies on a new data set on foreign fighter mobilizations, rare sources in Arabic, and interviews with former activists.
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Jeffrey Pickering
Armed Forces & Society, January 2011, Pages 119-140
Abstract:
Conscription has been claimed to both increase leaders' propensity to use military force abroad and constrain them from doing so. The author sheds new light on this longstanding controversy by presenting the first time-series, cross-national quantitative analysis of the impact that state military manpower systems (either conscription or volunteerism) have on the initiation of both traditional, belligerent military missions and "operations other than war" (OOTWs). Using negative binomial regression on 166 states from 1946 to 2001, the author finds that states with conscript militaries have a significantly higher propensity to use belligerent military force than states with volunteer armies. Countries that practice conscription are also more likely than countries with volunteer forces to launch a specific type of OOTW, military operations against nonstate actors such as rebels or terrorists. Neither form of military manpower system seems, however, to be significantly related to the initiation of humanitarian military operations.
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Defense Pacts: A Prescription for Peace?
Jesse Johnson & Brett Ashley Leeds
Foreign Policy Analysis, January 2011, Pages 45-65
Abstract:
Do military alliances lead to peace or to war? Research has suggested that defensive alliances to potential targets deter dispute initiation (Leeds 2003b:427). This would seem to suggest that forming defensive alliances is a good policy prescription for those seeking to encourage peace. Yet, some argue that even if defense pacts have a deterrence effect, defense pacts may also have other effects that increase militarized conflict in the international system. Specifically, defense pacts may encourage member states to initiate and/or escalate disputes. In an analysis covering the period from 1816 to 2000, we evaluate these three potential effects of defense pacts-deterrence, initiation, and escalation. We find support for the hypothesis that defensive alliances deter the initiation of disputes but no evidence in support of the claims that states with defensive allies are more likely to initiate disputes in the international system or that targets with allies are more likely to respond to dispute initiation with further militarization. We conclude that defensive alliances lower the probability of international conflict and are thus a good policy option for states seeking to maintain peace in the world.
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Forging Success: Soviet Managers and Accounting Fraud, 1943 to 1962
Mark Harrison
Journal of Comparative Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Attempting to satisfy their political masters in a target-driven culture, Soviet managers had to optimize on many margins simultaneously. One of these was the margin of truthfulness. False accounting for the value of production was apparently widespread in some branches of the economy and at some periods of time. A feature of accounting fraud was that cases commonly involved the aggravating element of conspiracy. The paper provides new evidence on the nature and extent of accounting fraud; the scale and optimal size of conspiratorial networks; the authorities' willingness to penalize it and the political and social factors that secured leniency; and inefficiency in the socialist market where managers competed for political credit.
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Cover for Thor: Divine Deception Planning for Cold War Missiles
Len Scott & Huw Dylan
Journal of Strategic Studies, October 2010, Pages 759-775
Abstract:
In the late 1950s, as intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) replaced bombers, the development of Soviet ICBMs prompted fears of strategic vulnerability in the West. The Eisenhower administration's decision to deploy Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs) on the territory of NATO allies sought to redress the perceived vulnerability until American ICBMs were ready. British deception planners considered how to enhance the threat posed by the IRBMs. An outline plan codenamed 'Celestial' was intended to persuade the Soviets that the otherwise vulnerable missiles could not be readily neutralised. This article explores this deception and how such planning also sought to convey accurate information alongside disinformation. It also suggests that deception planners appear to have given little heed to the potentially counterproductive consequences of such an operation.