We were saddened to learn of the passing of European Security’s founding editor (1992–2001), Dr Jacob Kipp, on 27th October 2021. Jacob Kipp gained his PhD in Russian history from Pennsylvania State University in 1970. He received a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship to study in Poland in 1968–1969 and subsequently held a IREX Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Leningrad State University. He held several academic posts including at Kansas State University, Miami University of Ohio, and the Centre for Strategic Technology of Texas A&M University, before moving to the Soviet Army Studies Office at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. He was the director of the Office in 2003–2006, before becoming the deputy director of the School of Advanced Military Studies within the US Army from 2006 to his retirement in 2009. During his career he was a highly productive scholar, publishing extensively on the Soviet and Russian military.
A member of European Security’s editorial board, Professor Roy Allison (University of Oxford), who knew Jacob Kipp writes:
Jacob Kipp, Jake to those knew him, was one of the leading Western authorities on the Soviet and Russian armed forces and above all on their approach to warfare. With fluent Russian and a real commitment to engage and discuss military theory analytically in a spirit of mutual understanding, he was one of few in the West who could build intellectual bridges effectively with Soviet and Russian officials and senior military officers in seminars and conferences when the opportunities first arose in the late 1980s with the ‘new thinking’ in Soviet foreign and security policy. As an analyst he used to emphasise the need to understand Russia’s tripartite categorisation of strategy, operational art and tactics. He wrote extensively about the Russian focus on military-technological development (the ‘revolution in military affairs’ in the 1980s and role of ‘aerospace’ forces in the 2000s). But he also understood the deep imprint of Soviet military thinkers of the 1920s and 1930s on the late Cold War and even post-Cold War Russian military outlook.
This knowledge deepened in working with outstanding Western historians of Soviet military operations, such as David Glantz at the Soviet Army Studies Office, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. In the Yeltsin years, even after the Russian-Western clash over the Kosovo campaign in 1999, he remained hopeful that military to military contacts could help break the ice, writing for example about the good tactical level cooperation between Russian and American forces in the KFOR peacekeeping operation in Kosovo. He remained hopeful later for progress in the NATO-Russia Council. This promise was not sustained. It now seems ironic that the kind of serious discussion of military theory and history, of the nature of strategy, which Jake once revelled in with so many Russians who respected his knowledge, was possible under Soviet rule. Such exchanges seem inconceivable with the new Russia, engaged in a grinding war of occupation driven by the polar opposite of the new thinking of the 1980s.
The European Security editors.