From the editors

This issue revolves around the security and military strategies of middle and smaller powers. It engages with the impact of smaller powers’ defence postures on alliance cohesion and offers a breadth of historical and more recent case studies of Israel’s and South Africa’s approaches to deterrence and military strategy. A theme running through this issue is the effect of threat perception on strategy-making. Relatedly, and perhaps reflecting the Zeitgeist, articles in this issue repeatedly address the use of force below the threshold of war to counter (emerging) threats.

Changes in the security environment since the end of the Cold War have raised questions about alliance coherence and cohesion.¹ How do threat perceptions affect alliance cohesion? Jason J. Castillo (Texas A&M University) and Alexander B. Downes (George Washington University) examine the behaviour of weaker partners allied with great powers when faced with new threats.² Under what circumstances will junior partners remain loyal, hedge, or exit the alliance? They argue that a patron’s capability and willingness to defend the protégé are the key factors shaping the latter’s decision; the ability to pursue nuclear weapons might encourage a protégé to hedge, while the desire to prevent proliferation might encourage a patron to reaffirm its security guarantees.³ The authors use three historical cases to illustrate their argument – Romania’s defection from the Axis Powers, Belgium’s decision to become neutral in 1936, and West Germany’s aborted nuclear weapons programme – but their theory has implications for US alliances today given the growing assertiveness of China and Russia which is perceived with different levels of urgency across alliance members.

The following four articles direct our attention to strategy-making in Israel. In a changing international environment, strategic flexibility and adaptability are warranted. Eitan Shamir (Bar Ilan University) offers a detailed analysis of the leadership style of Moshe Dayan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces from 1953 to 1958 and Defence Minister during the Six-Day War.⁴ Embedded in a discussion of emergent vs deliberate strategy,⁵ Shamir’s analysis considers Dayan as an archetype of the former and offers six leadership principles that enabled him to effectively practice emergent strategy and – with necessary adaptations to the context – can be used as blueprint for today’s leaders.

Next, Itamar Lifshitz and Erez Seri-Levy (Tel Aviv University) examine Israel’s use of ‘Inter-War Campaigns’, a doctrine that ‘utilises advantageous military and geopolitical conditions to formulate well-defined, proactive, preventive, frictional and continuous military campaigns, in order to engage in limited competition with adversaries over strategic objectives, below the threshold of war or severe conflict’.⁶ As Lifshitz and Seri-Levy outline, this strategic approach aims at delaying war, constantly weakening adversaries, and creating optimal conditions for Israel should war arise. The authors’ discussion of the development of this doctrine, its use against Iran in Syria, and its enabling factors allows us to better understand the conditions and purposes of the use of force short of war.

The limited use of force was also the approach Israel chose in 1981 to disrupt Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme. Steven E. Lobell (University of Utah) examines Israel’s decision to launch a preventive military strike against Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor.⁷ His explanation highlights the fungibility of power – how easily can a power resource be transferred into practical capability? Power resources with low fungibility are meant for a specific purpose and are thus hard to replace. Iraq’s nuclear programme is such a case: concentrated in a single location and dependent on specific expertise and outside support. Lobell outlines Israel’s decision-making in detail, contributing to our understanding of not only this case but also the underappreciated aspect of power fungibility and its effects on threat perception and decisions about the use of it more generally.⁸

Oren Barak, Amit Sheniak (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), and Assaf Shapira (The Israel Democracy Institute) discuss changes in Israel’s overall security strategy in the past decades.⁹ They argue that Israel’s military strategy features both offensive and defensive elements prominently, but the balance of these elements has changed in favour of defensive elements after the 1991 Gulf War. This shift is a reaction to changes in leaders’ threat perceptions which recently have highlighted the threat posed by terrorists and non-state actors over that posed by Israel’s neighbouring states. In response, Israel’s military strategy focuses on precision attacks, border defence, the limited and/or covert use of force, and counter-terrorism. Underlying these changes are also cultural shifts in military norms and values.

The final two research articles of this issue move on to discuss military doctrine and security strategy in South Africa during the Cold War. First, tackling the central question of military innovation during peacetime,¹⁰ Alon Posner (independent scholar) traces the development of military threat scenarios and military doctrine in South Africa from 1953 to 1975.¹¹ Analysing internal defence reviews and public defence white papers, he shows how perceptions of military threats and future war shaped defence strategy. Importantly, he highlights the organising role of narratives around future war, which served as legitimisation for defence planning and doctrine, as framework to interpret events, and as rhetorical tool for the military to convey their messages to politicians and the wider public.

Noel Anderson (University of Toronto) and Mark S. Bell’s (University of Minnesota) article neatly connects to that, analysing South African security strategy from 1975 to 1989.¹² Based on archival documents and elite interviews, their argument highlights the importance of the global order for strategy-making and the formulation of balance of power theories: while South Africa was militarily and economically the most powerful actor in the region, it feared Soviet intervention in the region. Its focus on escalation management thus led South Africa to opt for limited and covert use of armed force, which, however, protracted conflicts rather than solving them in South Africa’s favour; similarly, South Africa’s interest in acquiring nuclear weapons was a means to hedge against Soviet intervention and therefore has to be understood from this global perspective.

The original articles are followed by three review essays. First, Jeffrey Hughes (University of St Andrews), Martin Kornberger (University of Edinburgh and Vienna University of Economics and Business), Brad MacKay, Phillips O’Brien and Sneha Reddy (University of St Andrews) argue that organisational strategy, especially its ‘strategy as practice’ approach, offers valuable insights for strategic studies’ understanding of strategy.¹³ Their discussion offers new ways of thinking about existing questions and problems of strategic studies, such as friction in war, unintended effects of strategy, and the relationship between ends and means. It also highlights aspects that have tended to be marginalised in strategic studies, such as practice, power, and discourse.

Thomas Bottelier (University of Utrecht) reviews three recent books on maritime aspects of the Second World War: World War II at Sea: A Global History by Craig L. Symonds (2018); The Sea and the Second World War: Maritime Aspects of a Global Conflict, edited by Marcus Faulkner and Alessio Patalano (2019); and The War for the Seas: A Maritime History of World War II by Evan Mawdsley (2019). His extensive review essay assesses these books’ contributions to an understudied area.¹⁴

In an equally detailed discussion on the historiography of the American Civil War, Brian Holden-Reid (King’s College London) reviews three books against the background of different ‘turns’ in the study of the American Civil War: Michael C. C. Adams’ Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War (2014); Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh’s A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War (2016); and Donald Stoker’s The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War (2010).¹⁵

The issue concludes with a review of Andrea Ghiselli’s Protecting China’s Interests Overseas: Securitization and Foreign Policy (2021) written by David Brewster (Australian National University).¹⁶

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ See, for example, Luis Simón, Alexander Lanoszka and Hugo Meijer, ‘Nodal Defence: The Changing Structure of U.S. Alliance Systems in Europe and East Asia’, Journal of Strategic Studies 44/3 (2021), 360–388; Rupal N. Mehta, ‘Extended Deterrence and Assurance in an Emerging Technology Environment’, Journal of Strategic Studies 44/7 (2021), 958–982; Joseph F. Pilat, ‘A Reversal of Fortunes? Extended Deterrence and Assurance in Europe and East Asia’, Journal of Strategic Studies 39/4 (2016), 580–591.

² Jasen J. Castillo and Alexander B. Downes, ‘Loyalty, Hedging, or Exit: How Weaker Alliance Partners Respond to the Rise of New Threats’, Journal of Strategic Studies 46/2 (2023), 227–268.

³ For other studies on the relevance of assurance see Se Young Jang, ‘The Evolution of US Extended Deterrence and South Korea’s Nuclear Ambitions’, Journal of Strategic Studies 39/4 (2016), 502–520; Leopoldo Nuti, ‘Extended Deterrence and National Ambitions: Italy’s Nuclear Policy, 1955–1962’, Journal of Strategic Studies 39/4 (2016), 559–579. On the concept of assurance, see Jeffrey W. Knopf, ‘Varieties of Assurance’, Journal of Strategic Studies 35/3 (2012), 375–399.

⁴ Eitan Shamir, ‘How Leaders Exercise Emergent Strategy? Lessons from Moshe Dayan’, Journal of Strategic Studies 46/2 (2023), 269–292.

⁵ See also Ionut C. Popescu, ‘Grand Strategy vs. Emergent Strategy in the Conduct of Foreign Policy’, Journal of Strategic Studies 41/3 (2018), 438–460.

⁶ Itamar Lifshitz and Erez Seri-Levy, ‘Israel’s Inter-War Campaigns Doctrine: From Opportunism to Principle’, Journal of Strategic Studies 46/2 (2023), 293–318.

⁷ Steven E. Lobell, ‘Why Israel Launched a Preventive Military Strike on Iraq’s Nuclear Weapons Program (1981): The Fungibility of Power Resources’, Journal of Strategic Studies 46/2 (2023), 319–344.

⁸ For a related analysis of Israel’s broader approach to disrupting Iran’s nuclear programme, see Richard Maher, ‘The Covert Campaign against Iran’s Nuclear Program: Implications for the Theory and Practice of Counterproliferation’, Journal of Strategic Studies 44/7 (2021), 1014–1040. For a comparative study of the effectiveness of attacking nuclear facilities, see Sarah E. Kreps and Matthew Fuhrmann, ‘Attacking the Atom: Does Bombing Nuclear Facilities Affect Proliferation?’ Journal of Strategic Studies 34/2 (2011), 161–187.

⁹ Oren Barak, Amit Sheniak and Assaf Shapira, ‘The Shift to Defence in Israel’s Hybrid Military Strategy’, Journal of Strategic Studies 46/2 (2023), 345–377.

¹⁰ Phil Haun, ‘Peacetime Military Innovation Through Inter-Service Cooperation: The Unique Case of the U.S. Air Force and Battlefield Air Interdiction’, Journal of Strategic Studies 43/5 (2020), 710–736; Richard Lock-Pullan, ‘How to Rethink War: Conceptual Innovation and AirLand Battle Doctrine’, Journal of Strategic Studies 28/4 (2005), 679–702.

¹¹ Alon Posner, ‘Imagining Total Onslaught: South African Military Threat Scenarios and Doctrinal Change, 1953–1975’, Journal of Strategic Studies 46/2 (2023), 378–403.

¹² Noel Anderson and Mark S. Bell, ‘The Limits of Regional Power: South Africa’s Security Strategy, 1975–1989’, Journal of Strategic Studies 46/2 (2023), 404–426.

¹³ Jeffrey Hughes, Martin Kornberger, Brad MacKay, Phillips O’Brien and Sneha Reddy, ‘Organizational Strategy and its Implications for Strategic Studies: A Review Essay’, Journal of Strategic Studies 46/2 (2023), 427–450.

¹⁴ Th. W. Bottelier, ‘The Maritime Perspective: Placing the Oceans in the Study of the Second World War’, Journal of Strategic Studies 46/2 (2023), 451–468.

¹⁵ Brian Holden-Reid, ‘Which Way to Turn? Recent Directions in Writing about the American Civil War’, Journal of Strategic Studies 46/2 (2023), 469–493.

¹⁶ David Brewster, ‘Protecting China’s Interests Overseas: Securitization and Foreign Policy, Journal of Strategic Studies 46/2 (2023), 494–495.