Articles

266 Items

The 1st Battalion of the world-famous Foreign Legion arrived in Paris on July 12, 1939.

AP Photo

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

Leaning on Legionnaires: Why Modern States Recruit Foreign Soldiers

    Author:
  • Elizabeth M.F. Grasmeder
| Summer 2021

Modern states recurrently buttress their militaries with legionnaires—soldiers who are neither citizens nor subjects of the governments for which they fight. Legionnaire recruitment is a function of political constraints on a government's ability to enlist citizens and its perceptions of external territorial threats.

Clockwise from top left, Madeleine Albright, Nicholas Burns, Dina Powell McCormick, Ezinne Uzo-Okoro on screen during the event.

Kris Snibbe

Newspaper Article - Harvard Gazette

Three Notable Immigrants Who Served Their Adoptive Land

    Author:
  • Clea Simon
| May 13, 2021

America is a country built on immigrants and refugees, a truth acknowledged by former President George W. Bush in his recent collection of post-White House paintings, “Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants.” That spirit inspired a namesake Belfer Center Future of Diplomacy Project event featuring three notable women portrayed in the book who discussed the role of foreign-born Americans and their own decisions to enter public service in their adoptive nation.

Military exercise 'October Storm': Soviet soldiers march forward protected by T-54 tanks on the second day of the exercise of the Warsaw Pact member Staates, October 22, 1965 simulating an attack in the Thuringian Forest in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

AP Photo/Str

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

The Case for Campaign Analysis: A Method for Studying Military Operations

    Authors:
  • Rachel Tecott Metz
  • Andrew Halterman
| Spring 2021

Military operations lie at the center of international relations theory and practice. Campaign analysis is a method involving the use of a model and techniques for managing uncertainty to answer questions about military operations and consists of six standard steps.

French soldiers paddling from house to house in an inundated western front village searching for food in France on June 7, 1940. The French voluntarily flooded the village in an attempt to hold up the blitzkrieging German army.

AP Photo

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

Water and Warfare: The Evolution and Operation of the Water Taboo

    Author:
  • Charlotte Grech-Madin
| Spring 2021

Since the end of World War II, nation-states in international conflict have made concerted efforts to restrain the weaponization of water. Distinct from realist and rationalist explanations, the historical record reveals the rise of an international normative inhibition—a “water taboo”—on using water as a weapon.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gestures while addressing a joint meeting of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, May 24, 2011. Vice President Joe Biden, left, and House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, right, listen.

AP Photo/Susan Walsh

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

To Disclose or Deceive? Sharing Secret Information between Aligned States

| Winter 2020/21

When aligned states consider disclosing secret information about military plans to use force, the state initiating these plans may choose among four information-sharing strategies: collusion, compartmentalization, concealment, and lying. Three main considerations shape its decision: potential costs of deception, the partner’s intentions, and the partner’s capabilities.

In this June 3, 2020 file photo members of the District of Columbia Army National Guard stand guard at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington securing the area as protests continue following the death of George Floyd, a who died after being restrained by Minneapolis police officers. An Ohio National Guardsman was removed from policing protests in Washington D.C. after the FBI found he expressed white supremacist ideology online, Gov. Mike DeWine announced in a briefing Friday, June 5, 2020.

AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

Magazine Article - Foreign Affairs

The Real Threat to Civilian Control of the Military: The Officer Corps Can No Longer Simply Ignore Politics

| Jan. 18, 2021

The dominant culture of professionalism in the military today maintains a strict separation between the military and civilian spheres and bars officers from thinking about politics. It consequently undercuts the military’s role in ensuring the United States wins its wars and absolves military leaders of responsibility when the country fails to do so. That culture also leads the military to resent when civilian leaders intervene in battlefield decisions, hindering civilians’ ability to scrutinize military activity and ensure it serves civilians’ goals. Simply put, the prevailing culture of military professionalism undermines U.S. national security.

Saki Morioki, 5 years old, prays as paper lanterns float along the Motoyasu River in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome, Thursday, Aug. 6, 2020. in Hiroshima, western Japan. Japan marked the 75th anniversary Thursday of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The official lantern event was cancelled to the public due to coronavirus but a small group of local representatives released some lanterns. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

The Stopping Power of Norms: Saturation Bombing, Civilian Immunity, and U.S. Attitudes toward the Laws of War

Carpenter and Montgomery replicate a key question from Sagan and Valentino’s landmark survey of U.S. attitudes toward the laws of war and introduce variations into Sagan and Valentino’s experiment. The findings reveal Americans’ strong belief that targeting civilians is wrong, and that a majority would likely oppose such action in real life.

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

Correspondence: Clandestine Capabilities and Technological Diffusion Risks

David M. Allison and Stephen Herzog respond to Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long’s winter 2019/20 article, “Conceal or Reveal? Managing Clandestine Military Capabilities in Peacetime Competition.”

In this photo provided by the Department of Defense, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sits in a jeep at Yalta with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and V.M. Molotov, Feb. 1945.

AP Photo/Department of Defense

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

Partnership or Predation? How Rising States Contend with Declining Great Powers

| Summer 2020

When and why do rising states prey upon or support declining powers? A state’s choice of policy toward a declining power depends on two factors: whether that power is useful against challengers to the rising state, and the declining state’s military strength.

Chinese President Xi Jinping poses for photographers after delivering his speech, during a visit at the UNESCO headquarters, in Paris, Thursday March 27, 2014.

AP Photo/Christian Hartmann/Pool

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

China's Grand Strategy under Xi Jinping: Reassurance, Reform, and Resistance

    Author:
  • Avery Goldstein
| Summer 2020

While China’s grand strategy under Xi Jinping is clearly distinctive, it does not fundamentally break with the grand strategy that Chinese leaders have embraced since the early 1990s—one that aims to realize China’s “dream of national rejuvenation.”