From the Editors

We are delighted to announce that the Journal's impact factor, which is the measure of the number of times a given article is cited over a five-year period, has nearly tripled, from 0.344 in 2010 to 0.933 in 2011. As a result The Journal of Strategic Studies is currently ranked 26 out of 80 in international relations and 44 out of 148 in political science.1The editors would like to thank our readers, referees, the editorial board, our outstanding publishers and above all our top-quality authors. As the rise in our impact factor shows, more and more of the Journal's articles are influencing scholarly and policy debates. We hope to see further increases in our impact factor and ranking next year.

The high quality of policy-relevant scholarship in this issue will help. Our first article by Thomas J. Christensen of Princeton University tackles the strategic implications of China's nuclear modernization.2Drawing on the path-breaking work of Robert Jervis on nuclear deterrence, Christensen questions the premise that China's nuclear modernization simply stabilizes the strategic balance. By applying theories of deterrence and analysing Chinese doctrinal writing and capabilities, he shows that the new generation of Chinese nuclear weapons may be more consequential than is commonly believed. It is not clear, for instance, that Chinese strategists appreciate the inherent danger of basing their coercive capabilities for limited conventional conflicts on platforms (missiles and submarines) similar to those intended to ensure a nuclear second strike; it is also unclear that US planners appreciate the escalatory risk of strategies designed to destroy, blind or isolate China's command and control of its conventional forces also threaten command and control of its nuclear forces.

Our second article by Peter Viggo Jakobsen of the Royal Danish Defence College challenges the dominant explanations for Libya's nuclear reversal in 2003. Some commentators credit coercion in explaining the WMD turnaround, while others emphasize good diplomacy and real incentives offered to Tripoli in exchange for abandoning its nuclear programme. Jakobsen rejects this either-or approach, and instead adopts a sophisticated theoretical framework that combines coercion, carrots and confidence-building measures to offer a complete explanation of the 2003 Libyan decision. Policy-makers, he concludes, must use a similar range of policy tools to achieve similar results in the cases of Iran and North Korea.

The next two articles, the first by Sergio Catignani of Sussex University and the second by Eric Jardine of Carlton University, address the complex organizational problems posted by insurgency and counter-insurgency warfare.3Catignani reassesses the British Army's performance in Afghanistan. He questions the degree to which ‘bottom-up military adaptation’ has occurred at the task force/brigade level. Drawing on lower level tactical unit interviews and other data, he shows how the British Army has been unable or unwilling to adapt due to their lack of understanding of the principles of counter-insurgency warfare. Jardine looks at the problem of this type of warfare from the viewpoint of the insurgent. He shows that highly fragmented insurgencies can achieve a high level of strategic impact through tacit coordination. As his evidence from the Soviet-Afghan war shows, coordinated behavior between insurgent groups can evolve tacitly if such groups are ‘commonly positioned’ in either rural or urban settings and have a ‘common script of tactical-level actions’.

Finally, this issue includes a fine addition to our new series of thought provoking review essays. In ‘Politics, History and the Ivory Tower-Policy Gap in the Nuclear Proliferation Debate’, Francis J. Gavin of the University of Texas examines the controversy sparked by Kenneth Waltz about whether the spread of nuclear weapons is a stabilizing or de-stabilizing factor in world politics since 1945.4His review of Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate, not only raises serious theoretical and empirical problems with the theory that nuclear weapons proliferation can be stabilizing, but he also questions the value of a debate that for him has become too divorced from the realities of policy-making.

Notes

¹2011 JCR Social Science Edition, <http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/science_products/a-z/journal_citation_reports/>.

²For earlier essays on this and related topics, see Michael S. Chase, Andrew W. Erickson, and Christopher Yeaw, ‘Chinese Theater and Strategic Missile Force Modernization and its Implications for the United States’, Journal of Strategic Studies 32/1 (Feb. 2009), 67–114; Tai Ming Cheung, ‘Dragon on the Horizon: China's Defense Industrial Renaissance’, Journal of Strategic Studies 32/1 (Feb. 2009), 29–66; Tai Ming Cheung, ‘The Chinese Defense Economy's Long March from Imitation to Innovation’, Journal of Strategic Studies 34/3 (June 2011), 325–54; Thomas G. Mahnken, ‘China's Anti-Access Strategy in Historical and Theoretical Perspective’, Journal of Strategic Studies 34/3 (June 2011), 299–323; Samm Tyroler-Cooper and Alison Peet, ‘The Chinese Aviation Industry: Techno-Hybrid Patterns of Development in the C919 Program’, Journal of Strategic Studies 34/3 (June 2011), 383–404; Eric Hagt and Matthew Durnin, ‘Space, China's Tactical Frontier,’ Journal of Strategic Studies 34/5 (Oct. 2011), 733–61.

³Earlier articles on this theme include Theo Farrell, ‘Improving in War: Military Adaptation and the British in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, 2006–2009’, Journal of Strategic Studies 33/4 (Aug. 2010), 567–94; James A. Russell, ‘Innovation in War: Counterinsurgency Operations in Anbar and Ninewa Provinces, Iraq, 2005–2007’, Journal of Strategic Studies 33/4 (Aug. 2010), 595–624 and Paul Dixon, ‘“Hearts and Minds”? British Counter-Insurgency from Malaya to Iraq’, Journal of Strategic Studies 32/3 (2009), 353–81.

⁴Sarah E. Kreps and Matthew Fuhrmann, ‘Attacking the Atom: Does Bombing Nuclear Facilities Affect Proliferation?’ Journal of Strategic Studies 34/2 (April 2011), 161–87.