From the editors

The clash of rival forces in war is unpredictable. This is true, but it is also banal. More interesting for strategic studies is how rival forces adapt to the unexpected in wartime. Adaptation in various forms occupies the articles in this double issue.

In ‘Coercive diplomacy and the Donbas: Explaining: Russian strategy in Eastern Ukraine,’ Andrew S. Bowen explores a critical puzzle about recent Russian strategy. In 2014, Russia was able to quickly seize control and annex Crimea. In Eastern Ukraine, however, it became mired in a protracted conflict. Why? Bowen finds part of the answer in Russia’s much-discussed hybrid approach, which includes a mix of conventional military force and support for non-state proxy groups. These groups were useful in Crimea, where the goal was straightforward. But they proved difficult to manage in the Donbas, where Russia’s goals were more ambiguous. The failure of its approach forced Russia to improvise, and then opt for a limited military intervention. Bowen’s findings have important implications for our understanding of non-state actors in limited wars, a subject of considerable recent attention.¹ Proxies are low-cost and deniable, but those same qualities make them hard to control. Coercion in limited war requires the ability to send reasonably clear and credible signals, but the use of covert forces works against this goal.

Raphael D. Marcus is also interested in the clash of conventional and unconventional forces, but he takes a different approach. In ‘’Learning “Under Fire”: Israel’s improvised military adaptation to Hamas tunnel warfare,’ Marcus explores how conventional militaries can adapt to their unconventional tactics in real time. He argues that the answer has to do with both military culture and organisational design. Both proved critical in Israel’s 2014 war with the military group Hamas. The culture of the Israel Defence Forces favoured action and flexibility. The design encouraged innovation via specialised ‘incubator’ units and a ready system to disseminate new ideas.²

The next article explores attitudes and performance of the IDF in more detail. In ‘“A Time of War”: contextual and organisational dimensions in the construction of combat motivation in the IDF,’ Uzi Ben-Shalom and Yizhaq Benbenisty present findings from a survey of Israeli military personnel. They argue that adaptation is always necessary for the IDF, which faces an array of different types of combat. Understanding how soldiers understand these conflicts goes a long way towards understanding their motivation. According to Ben-Shalom and Benbenisty, their attitudes are often quite different of civilian and military leadership. Effective combat leadership will require understanding their motivations, and taking their attitudes seriously.³

Transnational groups may cause national security forces to deal with particularly lethal new threats. In ‘Metastases: Exploring the impact of foreign fighters in conflicts abroad,’ R. Kim Cragin and Susan Stipanovich argue that foreign fighters have globalised local conflicts by making Salafi-jihadist ideology central to what would otherwise be run of the mill contests for power. In addition, they have brought combat skills and a logistics infrastructure that allows them to sustain the fight. This will put stress on states that are forced to adapt. The quality of their adaptation will become increasingly important as foreign fighters exit Iraq and Syria and turn their attention elsewhere.⁴

How do states cope with rebellion? How do weak armies grow and adapt in the face of ongoing threats to the government? In ‘Improvise, adapt and fail to overcome? Capacity building, culture and exogenous change in Sierra Leone,’ Alex Neads focuses on how foreign powers train local armies in wartime. The decidedly mixed record reveals that not all methods are suited for adapting to local conditions. Beginning in 2000, British army began efforts to build the capacity of the Sierra Leone Armed Forces, with some success. Nonetheless, the effort was not able to overcome a long tradition of patrimonial practices. Neads shows that local forces are capable of adaptation, but that cultural forces may inhibit reforms even when militaries have reasons to abandon them.⁵

In ‘Counterinsurgency as armed reform: The political history of the Malayan Emergency,’ David H. Ucko tackles the issue of adaptation from a different direction. Instead of focusing on wartime military reform, he explores how a combination of political hard bargaining and elite concessions are necessary to end insurgencies. Ucko casts his view on the Malayan emergency, a paradigmatic case for counterinsurgency researchers. More attention to political adaptation, or what he calls ‘armed reform,’ may shed insight into the process of war termination.⁶

Factional politics exacerbate the problem of strategic adaptation in wartime. In ‘Factional politics in the Iran–Iraq war,’ Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar reveals the depth of these rivalries in Iran during the 1980s. They included fights between nationalists and Islamists; the army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; and ultimately between factions within the Islamist camp. Intense factional politics complicated the already enormous problem of fending off a well-armed Iraqi threat. The factions, moreover, had different and sometimes contrary motives. The Islamists wanted to consolidate their control over the state, but they worried that a decisive military victory for the army might actually strengthen the position of the nationalists. Factional politics also worked against efforts to terminate the war. Tabaar’s findings are a reminder that strategic decisions and international outcomes often rest on chaotic domestic affairs.⁷

Samuel Huntington famously introduced the idea of a ‘strategic concept,’ an explanation of why a state should invest in its military forces. A plausible strategic concept may be hard to find for states that face no obvious military rivals, and for which the chance of conventional war is vanishingly small. In ‘Civil-military relations and human security in a post-dictatorship,’ Carlos Solar describes the purpose of the modern Chilean military. Solar notes that in Chile, ‘conventional war seems a thing of the past,’ and argues that its defence policies have increasingly emphasised human security. But increasing responsibilities in non-traditional areas may not sit well with traditional commanders. In addition, the military may struggle to take a greater domestic role without reverting to its history of repression. Negotiating its new strategic concept will require careful attention to civil-military relations.⁸

The last article in this double issue takes the question of adaptation to an entirely different domain. ‘From the sea to outer space: The command of space as the foundation of spacepower theory,’ Bleddyn E. Bowen charts a theoretical framework for understanding spacepower in strategic theory. Following Alfred Thayer Mahan, Bownen develops ideas about space command, control, and denial. This framework may prove useful for scholars as the United States and others grapple with strategy in the final frontier.⁹

Campbell Craig ends the issue with an extended review of Stephen Walt’s The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (2018).

Notes

¹ Recent work on the use of proxies includes Yelena Biberman, ‘Self-Defense Militias, Death Squads, and State Outsourcing of Violence in India and Turkey’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 41/5 (2018), 751–781; Stephen Tankel, ‘Beyond the Double Game: Lessons from Pakistan’s Approach to Islamist Militancy’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 41/4 (2018), 545–575; and Alex Wilner, ‘The Dark Side of Extended Deterrence: Thinking through the State Sponsorship of Terrorism’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 41/3 (2018), 410–437.

² On military innovation generally see Brian N. Hall, ‘The British army, information management and the First World War revolution in military affairs’, The Journal ofsdfsofofStrategic Studies 41/7 (2018), 1001–1030. On one kind of specialized unit, see Eitan Shamir and Eyan Ben-Ali, ‘The Rise of Special Operations Forces: Generalized Specialization, Boundary Spanning and Military Autonomy’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 41/3 (2018), 335–371. On the limits of innovation see Torunn Laugen Haaland, ‘The Limits to Learning in Military Operations: Bottom-up Adaptation in the Norwegian Army in Northern Afghanistan, 2007–2012’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 39/7 (2016), 999–1022.

³ On combat motivation, see the selection of articles in The Journal of Strategic Studies 37/6–7 (2014). The section begins with Jonathan Fennell, ‘Morale and Combat Performance: an Introduction’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 37/6–7 (2014), 796–798.

⁴ In some cases the transformation works in the other direction. See Emil Aslan Souleimanov, ‘Making Jihad or Making Money? Understanding the Transformation of Dagestan’s Jamaats into Organised Crime Groups’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 41/4 (2018), 604–628.

⁵ On training and equipping local forces, see Stephen Biddle, Julia Macdonald, and Ryan Baker, ‘Small footprint, small payoff: The military effectiveness of security force assistance’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 41/1–2 (2018), 89–142.

⁶ Some regimes may be unable to cut political deals even if they temporarily suppress insurgencies. See Daniel Byman,’”Death Solves All Problems”: The Authoritarian Model of Counterinsurgency’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 39/1 (2016): 62–93. On the problems of adaption in counterinsurgency see Christian Tripoldi, ‘The British Army, “Understanding”, and the Illusion of Control’, The Journal of Strategic Studies, 41/5 (2018), 632–658.

⁷ On domestic politics and military organization in a different context see James Char and Richard A Bitzinger, ‘Reshaping the People’s Liberation Army since the 18th Party Congress: Politics, Policymaking, and Professionalism’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 39/5–6 (2016), 599–607.

⁸ For another argument about the relationship between civil-military relations and innovation, see Anit Mukerjee, ‘Fighting Separately: Jointness and Civil-Military Relations in India’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 40/1–2 (2017), 6–34.

⁹ See also Kevin Pollpeter, ‘Space, the New Domain: Space Operations and Chinese Military Reforms’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 39/5–6 (2016), 709–727.