Conveners
Military Interventions
- Peter Viggo Jakobsen (Royal Danish Defence College)
Description
With the winding down of large-scale boots-on-the-ground multinational missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, it has become apparent in both policy and academic circles that large-scale military interventions are but one option among others. Many other kinds of military interventions have been and are being launched and implemented, ranging from military assistance, to more ‘agile’ counterinsurgency, drone fighting, peacekeeping, and aerial interventions, among others. Recent work has investigated the politics of forming multinational coalitions for launching military interventions. Other contributions have explored the politics of implementation, looking at caveats and actual behavior of troops on the ground. A third strand has explored the implication of military interventions for the civil-military relations of the home country when those soldiers return home. Notwithstanding recent advances, within the field of security studies, there is little clarity about the conceptual, theoretical and empirical underpinnings of different kinds of military interventions with important implications for both scholarship and policy. This panel welcomes contributions on different types of military interventions and potential comparisons. Contributions are welcome from a variety of disciplines (history, political science, sociology, etc.) and may shed light on conceptual, theoretical and empirical aspects of the ongoing debate on military interventions within the security studies debate in dialogue with other neighboring fields such as peace and conflict research, war studies and military sociology.
Ever since the Gulf War, the Western way of war has been firmly anchored in network-centric combined arms operations and executing them with a Clausewitzian concentration of forces to disarm the enemy. For this dislocating attack to effect psychological shock and operational and tactical surprise, speed and agility in movement are essential. The undiminished belief in unrivaled AirLand...
Whether a state intervenes militarily in international crises and civil wars depends on the type of relations the two states maintain. Formal alliance and defense cooperation agreements are a costly signal of assistance but not in every case can a country count on its friends. The reliability of cooperation agreements is especially important for smaller states that are dependent on support...
The Resistance Operating Concept (ROC) brings Second World War and Cold War stay-behind resistance operations back into consideration for strategic and operational planners. The ROC describes national stay-behind civilian resistance organization during partial or total occupation by a belligerent actor. Current events in Eastern Europe have triggered military interest in preparing for such...
In this paper, we explore the development of Western military missions, examining the shift from ‘winding down large-scale boots-on-the-ground multinational missions’ to a lighter military footprint, characterised by more distant security force assistance (SFA). Specifically, we focus on advisory and capacity-building activities in Iraq, concentrating on the day-to-day work conducted in NATO...
