From the Editors

The diversity of topics in this issue of The Journal of Strategic Studies illustrates not only how complex strategic studies has become since the end of the Cold War but also the continuity of the field’s principal concerns. Audrey Kurth Cronin of George Mason University, USA, deals with the ongoing struggle against Al-Qa’eda and its affiliates yet asks the age-old question of what it means to win such a conflict. With Osama bin Laden dead and the US winding down its military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, she points out that there is a danger that continuing anti-Al-Qa’eda operations such as the drone campaign, raids by special operations forces, and covert action may become needlessly prolonged to the detriment of US national interests. Cronin sets out a concrete strategy for bringing the conflict against Al-Qa’eda to the point at which the threat is manageable so that US policymakers and officials can focus on other priorities.¹

One of those priorities is of course the Asia-Pacific region, where China’s neighbors debate what that nation’s military rise and more assertive foreign policy will mean for them. Trying to determine how a rising great power will behave based on its historical experiences and cultural predilections is as old as strategy itself. In his article, Sangkuk Lee of the Korean Institute for Defense Analyses argues that China’s doctrine of the ‘Three Warfares’ – psychological warfare, public opinion warfare, and legal warfare – stems from an ancient tradition of using non-military means to achieve strategic ends. Lee concludes that Beijing’s implementation of the Three Warfares as it pursues its peaceful rise will place a heavy strain on China’s neighbors.²

The debate about the rise of China and its international consequences is often couched in terms of the balance of power, a classic concept that has come under a great deal of criticism in recent years in the fields of international relations theory and strategic studies. Critics of the theory point to a lack of balancing behavior on the part of other powers in response to American unipolarity in first decade of this century. In our third article, Reuben Steff and Nicholas Khoo of the University of Otago, New Zealand, argue that a study of Russia’s response to the US deployment of Ballistic Missile Defense systems during the 2001–08 George W. Bush presidency do indeed exhibit characteristics of ‘hard balancing’ and is symptomatic of an underlying security dilemma dynamic between the two powers, a concept that unpins balance of power theories.³

Why individuals fight for a cause as irregulars remains a puzzle for the social sciences, psychology and of course strategic studies. In an attempt to shed light on this question with respect to Islamist militants in Pakistan, Christine Fair of Georgetown University⁴ presents a unique database of 1,625 posthumously published biographies of members of two militant organizations Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizbul-Mujahideen, all of whom were killed in the course of carrying out attacks. The number of observations in this database, she shows, is a full order of magnitude larger than those of previous databases assembled from militant biographies. As Fair forcefully argues, analysis of the database undermines many common myths about the motives of Pakistani militants – that they are driven by a lack of educational and economic opportunities – and thus she casts doubt on current US policy approaches to mitigating Islamist militancy in Pakistan.

It is something of a truism in strategic studies that one of the foundations of learning how to think strategically requires a study of history. Critics of this approach point out that policymakers frequently use history badly because they seek clear and simple ‘lessons’ from history. In our final essay, ‘Statecraft, Decision Making and the Varieties of Historical Experience’, William Inboden of the University of Texas–Austin turns this critique on its head. He shows that policymakers are more sophisticated and varied in their use of history than scholars assume. Before attempting to improve the way in which policymakers use history, he argues, scholars should first employ a much more sophisticated understanding of the multiple but definable ways they approach history.

Finally, this issue includes a review essay of recent histories of the July 1914 crisis and the outbreak of World War I by Francis J. Gavin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in which he shows explores the vast challenges that war’s outbreak presents to political scientists who wish to generalize from it and to historians who seek to understand it in its own right.

Notes

¹ Compare Cronin’s article with David J. Kilcullen, ‘Countering Global Insurgency’, Journal of Strategic Studies 28/4 (Aug. 2005), 597–617 and Peter R. Neumann and M.L.R. Smith, ‘Strategic Terrorism: The Framework and its Fallacies’, Journal of Strategic Studies 28/4 (Aug. 2005), 571–95.

² Other recent articles on a similar theme include: Thomas G. Mahnken, ‘China’s Anti-Access Strategy in Historical and Theoretical Perspective’, Journal of Strategic Studies 34/3 (June 2011), 299–323; Tai Ming Cheung, ‘Dragon on the Horizon: China’s Defense Industrial Renaissance’, Journal of Strategic Studies 32/1 (Feb. 2009), 29–66; Evelyn Goh, ‘Southeast Asian Perspectives on the China Challenge’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 30/4-5 (Aug. 2007), 809–32.

³ Chaka Ferguson, ‘The Strategic Use of Soft Balancing: The Normative Dimensions of the Chinese–Russian “Strategic Partnership”’, Journal of Strategic Studies 35/2 (April 2012), 197–222.

⁴ See her earlier article: C. Christine Fair and Shuja Nawaz, ‘The Changing Pakistan Army Officer Corps,’ Journal of Strategic Studies 34/1 (Feb. 2011), 63–94.