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Economic and trade linkages form an important aspect of the age-old relationship between India and Central Asia. The Central Asian region is strategically located in the middle of the Eurasian Cont...

The Pentagon announced a third “offset” strategy in 2014, claiming that the United States faces threats from Russia, China, and elsewhere that require the development and deployment of cutting-edge technologies – robots, autonomous systems, and 3D printing, for example – to maintain US military superiority. The authors compare the new offset with earlier offsets that gave the United States a military advantage over the Soviet Union during the Cold War, even though the Soviets had massive conventional forces. This time around, though, the authors conclude that an offset is unnecessary to keep the United States in the lead, and that it is really just an excuse to increase defense spending.

In September 2015, news reports surfaced that more than 50 U.S. intelligence analysts working with the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) had filed complaints with the Pentagon's inspector general alle...

For many austerity-hit Western countries, the defence budget has been a prime target for significant cuts. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the United States. Yet one element of the Pentagon's budget continues to grow: cyber. High-profile security breaches at the corporate level and reports of cyber-espionage at the national level seemingly justify the vast sums involved in ensuring cyber-security. However, Robert M Lee and Thomas Rid argue that ‘cyber-angst’ is damaging – and self-serving. In this article, they list thirteen reasons why such cyber-security hype is counterproductive.

In May 2013 the Pentagon released an unclassified summary of the top-secret Air-Sea Battle (ASB) Concept. ASB serves to focus the Pentagon’s efforts to organize, train and equip the armed forces against advanced weapons systems that threaten the US military’s unfettered freedom of access and action in the global commons. While officials claim ASB is merely improve service interoperability and could be applied in any number of conflict situations, this article argues that in fact the doctrine represents the Pentagon’s plan for confronting China’s increasingly capable and confident military. This raises two urgent questions: how does ASB fit into an overall US foreign policy toward China – and, if a military confrontation cannot be avoided, are there less risky alternatives, such a maritime blockade, that can achieve the same ends as ASB?

In the twilight of the USA’s ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there has been an expanding shadow war of targeted killings and drone strikes outside conventional war zones, where violence is largely disappeared from media coverage and political accountability. While many attribute the growth in these shadowy operations to the use of new technologies and platforms such as drones, this article argues that the central transformation enabling these operations is the increasing emergence of network forms of organization within and across the US military and related agencies after 2001. Drawing upon evidence from unclassified reports, academic studies, and the work of investigative journalists, this article will show that elements within the US military and related agencies developed in the decade after 2001 a form of shadow warfare in which hybrid blends of hierarchies and networks combine through common information and self-synchronization to mount strike operations across transnational battle spaces. But, rather than a top-down transformation towards networks, this article will show how it was the evolution of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) from an elite strike force into a largely autonomous networked command that has been central to this process. Although drone strikes have received the bulk of critical attention in relation to this expanding shadow war of targeted killing, this often-lethal networked warfare increasingly resembles a global and possibly permanent policing operation in which targeted operations are used to manage populations and threats in lieu of addressing the social and political problems that produce the threats in the first place.

There is a good reason why the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program is so often described as the "arms deal of the century." In a report published on the last day of 2010, the Pentagon estimated lifetime operating and sustainment costs for the US F-35 Aeet-then projected at 2,443 units, not counting the prototypes-at US$1.45 trillion.1 Cost analyses of this type are always much-debated: How many units will be sold in total? How does one define "lifetime"? How reliable will the system be once it enters service? What will be the nature of its deployment? And so on. Beyond dispute is that the F-35 constitutes one of the largest, if not the largest, weapons programs in modem history.The story of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) began in 1994, when the United States Congress decided to merge two separate Department of Defense fighter jet research projects. The idea was to produce a "fifth generation" fighter aircraft for the joint use of the US Air Force (USAF), Navy, and Marine Corps. Preliminary research contracts were divided mainly among McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, Northrop Gmmman, and Lockheed Martin, which subsequently formed teams that also involved other contractors, like Dassault (partnered with Boeing) and BAE (forming a threesome with McDonnell Douglas and Northrop Gmmman). The JSF program was purposely internationalized: a memorandum of understanding was signed by the US and British governments in December 1995, specifying a 90-10 split for co-funding the aircraft's demonstration phase, or, as it was officially known, the Weapons System Concept Demonstration (WSCD) phase.4 In November 1996 the Pentagon selected Lockheed Martin and Boeing as lead contractors; in October 2001 a long and fierce competition to carry out System Development and Demonstration (SDD) was won by the former. The Lockheed demonstrator X-35 turned into the F-35 Lightning II, which carried out its maiden flight in 2006; the two Boeing X-32 prototypes ended up in museums in Ohio and Maryland.The JSF was conceived from the beginning as a multi-role aircraft that would be capable of replacing four or five separate aircraft in use by the US military. To that end, the program gave birth to three different warplanes: the F-35A or the Conventional Take-Off Landing (CTOL) version, which is intended to replace the F-16 Fighting Falcon and A-10 Thunderbolt; the F-35B Short Take-Off and Vertical Landing (STOVL), replacing the AV-8B Harrier II; and the F-35C Carrier Version (CV), taking over from the F/A18 Hornet and possibly the Super Hornet. All three versions completed the critical design reviews and are now in the SDD phase. Low Rate Initial Production (LRIP) aircraft are rolling out from Lockheed Martin's assembly plant in Forth Worth, Texas, and the final Production, Sustainment, and Follow-on Development (PSFD) phase appears to be on the horizon. The US Marine Corps have established an "operational" squadron of F-35S at their Yuma, Arizona airbase, while instructor pilot training on the initial F-35S set to roll off the assembly line is progressing at a USAF base in Florida.5Globalized industrial partnerships propelled the JSF from the outset, but the multinational collaborative project took shape gradually. Most US allies were not "briefed" on the JSF until the beginning of the SDD phase, and it is unclear how the US government-specifically the nascent JSF office-decided which governments to engage.4 Canada joined in 1997, turning the US-UK collaboration into a multinational one. At that point, the JSF specified the conditions for different "levels" or "tiers" of partnership. Each level was mainly determined by the size of the partner's contribution. Level 1 partners contribute approximately 10 percent to the development of the aircraft. The UK is the only Level 1 partner and has committed $2.2 billion to the program. Level 2 partners, such as Italy and the Netherlands, contribute approximately $1 billion. Level 3 partners-Australia, Canada, Denmark, Norway, and Turkey-contribute $ioo-$2oo million. …

In the past few years, the Indian Ocean has emerged as a major center of geostrategic interest. The Pentagon's 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) set the tone by calling for a more “integrated a...

In March 2009, the Obama administration sent a message to senior Pentagon staff instructing them to refrain from using either of the terms ‘Long War’ or ‘Global War on Terror’ and to replace these terms with ‘Overseas Contingency Operations’. The change in tone and, potentially, substance, from the Obama White House by ending the ‘war on terror’ at the rhetorical level suggests a need to shift our academic attention towards developing more appropriate analytical frameworks for examining alternative strategies for countering terrorism. This paper seeks to explore what it terms an emerging risk-based approach being deployed by states. Our framework proposed here deploys the twin concepts of ‘risk bureaucracies’ and risk regulatory regimes (RRRs) in examining terrorist financing and aviation security regulations.

In 2001, the United States government selected Lockheed Martin (over Boeing) to lead the development of a fifth generation fighter aircraft for the use by the United States’ Air Force, Navy, and Marines. Although assorted Congressional committees and Pentagon officials have continued to express no shortage of concerns over the project's overruns, delays and performance shortfalls of the F-35, the so-called “arms deal of the century” remains on track. Along with several other United States’ allies, Canada expressed interest early on by contributing funds toward the development of the F-35, and many Canadian companies have already been involved in the project. In 2010, the Harper government vowed to buy 65 F-35s. This special issue takes a second look at this proposed military procurement, and examines the main issues of concern for Canada.

Joint Task Force (JTF) Guantánamo, the high-profile US military detention and inter- rogation operation, was established in January 2002 to house the ‘worst of the worst’ of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. It nevertheless became a public spectacle that was essen- tial for constituting the reality of a Global War on Terror. Through evolving media and VIP tours of the facilities coupled with the Bush administration’s military analyst programme (a system of reverse embeds used to promote Pentagon messages within the U.S. media), Guantánamo became a simulation essential for producing the real- ity of the war. It became a key way to convince the public that the war was real and necessary, but also that its conduct was just and humane, and therefore, by exten- sion, that the United States can be understood as ‘good’. Through a triple screen of the tours, the visitors and their mediation, the telegenic spectacle of Guantánamo was transmuted into a reality of Guantánamo as ‘safe, humane, legal and transparent’. The importance of this for producing understandings of the Global War on Terrorism (GWoT) bears closer examination. Without this triple screen, Guantánamo does not exist.

This article considers the truth value of the BBC's reporting of the invasion of Iraq in the context of Hannah Arendt's consideration of the US invasion of Vietnam. Arendt theorized that the ‘Pentagon Papers’ exposed a new approach to truth and lies – the ‘modern political lie’ at the heart of modern politics. In this article, Arendt's concept of the modern political lie is examined and comparisons made with Iraq. A case study of the BBC's coverage of the invasion is used to argue that its reporting did not necessarily lie about Iraq, nor did it necessarily create a discursive representation separate to the physical actions of the protagonists. Rather, it appears that strategic considerations on the part of the invading powers changed the factual texture on the ground, which reporting failed to keep up with.

Cooperation between civilian and military actors has become a catchphrase in international crisis management and development policy in the 21st century. This paper examines the crisis management policies adopted in Africa by the United States and the European Union (EU), respectively. It is hypothesised that both actors’ crisis management policies are likely to be path dependent, despite recent significant changes in policy preferences. It is shown that the priority combining civilian and military resources in American crisis management is only implemented to a limited degree. It is consistent with the persistent predominance of the Pentagon and of the military instruments in US Africa policy. It illustrates the conspicuous institutional path dependency of US Africa policy, which by some is described as ‘militarised’. The EU has been able to apply both civilian and military instruments in crisis management in Africa, suggesting the policy is not path dependent. The European situation is arguably attributable to the widespread consensus among European actors that it is necessary to combine civilian and military instruments in crisis management.

Given the nature of global counterinsurgency operations, the demands of military expansion, and the need for cultural, linguistic, and regional expertise, the United States Army should evaluate the establishment of US-led foreign troop units for its evolving force structure. This article proposes the creation of an American foreign legion based upon the recruitment of US-led, ethnically homogeneous tribal force units to meet the grist mill of counterinsurgency operations. This structured approach would be more beneficial than the current reliance on a de facto American Foreign Legion, represented by private military contractors (PMCs), many of them comprised of foreigners. These PMCs carry a number of oversight, accountability, and legal risks not found in a fully integrated, and US-officered foreign legion. The British Brigade of Gurkhas, the South-West African Police Counter-Insurgency Unit (Koevoet), and the Kit Carson Scouts serve as relevant historical examples where foreign troops were used to suppl...

In 1975 Gerald Ford became the first President bound by the War Powers Resolution. Enacted in 1973, members of Congress, still fuming over the revelations crystallized by the Pentagon Papers that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was a sham, sought to prevent future Presidents from starting future Vietnam Wars. Though Ford voted against the measure twice as a Congressman, as President he respected the law and Congress enforcing it. This article explores Ford's efforts and actions as he complied with the law. Ford's attitude and acquiescence reflected his efforts he heal the nation.

This study argues that the strategic planning process of the Long War on Terror has been conducted in a manner that did not pay sufficient attention to the tenets of classical strategic theory. The article shows that the strategy encapsulated in the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism and the Pentagon's initial responses to the challenges of irregular warfare departed from important principles associated with Clausewitz and other strategic theorists, undermining the prospects for successful counterterrorism. The reasons are partly the fault of the Bush administration, and partly a consequence of the American strategic culture and the preferred model of American civil–military relations. By turning back to strategic fundamentals, important improvements in strategic performance have been accomplished since 2006. The Obama administration can build upon the later successes of its predecessor in Iraq and in reshaping the US armed forces. In addition, the new president can refine and improve the Bush admi...

The next Pentagon team will be faced with the dual challenge of advising on key current wartime decisions while also preparing the U.S. armed forces for a far different future. They must be stewards of the military, not just users of the instrument.

Catastrophic events often illustrate a nation’s preparedness in anticipating and preventing the extreme consequences of an intentional malicious attack. When terrorists hijacked four commercial aircraft for use as guided missiles against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the world’s population became aware of the human potential to inflict destruction and harm, and the vulnerability of transportation systems against preventing the occurrence of similar disasters. Through research, simulation, and system analysis, procedures may be formulated that limit or eradicate the possibility of future occurrences. Operations research encompasses the optimal allocation of resources subject to constraints, as well as providing techniques that evaluate the performance of security policies. This article provides a survey of operations research activities directed toward analyzing and enhancing the aviation security system, with the intent to be informative and motivate the continual improvement of our nation’s transportation security.

When Donald Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon as Secretary of Defense after a quarter-century hiatus, he found a defense establishment desperately in need of radical change; what he termed “transformation.” By the time of his departure, and in spite of the pressures caused by 9/11 and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Rumsfeld could point to a record of significant change in the way the DoD functioned. Rumsfeld significantly altered the planning and strategy process; the command structure; force organization, deployment, training and warfighting capability; financial management; and the personnel system. Yet Rumsfeld's transformation has not been without its critics. Some say he has moved too quickly, others that he has moved too slowly. And still others argue that his efforts, while laudatory, have not focused on the right issues. Time will tell whether his enterprise will succeed, and will be accepted by the conservative culture that pervades the DoD. The Korean Defense Reform Plan (DRP...

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the Pentagon came up with the Global Defense Posture Review in an effort to effectively deal with the terrorist threats. The U.S. Defense Department's strong commitment to the military transformation stems from America's successful wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan. The idea of network-centric warfare for speed-oriented effect-based operations necessitated the Pentagon to change America's global footprints toward reshaping its military to be able to rapidly respond to the elusive and transnational threats. The U.S. Forces in Korea (USFK) accordingly proceeded to relocate the heavily armed division-strong ground forces (2nd Infantry Division) near the DMZ to south of the Han River where expeditionary airlift or sealift would be readily provided. Facing growing concerns among senior Koreans over decreased readiness against North Korea's surprise attack, the USFK promised to introduce 140 new items of highly lethal and effective ISR PGMs assets to Korea. At...

The White House and the Pentagon have designated the military's Special Operations Command as the lead organization in the ‘war on terror’. As the military has become more involved in fighting terrorism since 9/11, special operations forces have become increasingly active in the covert, or unacknowledged, operations that have traditionally been the CIA's bailiwick. This article examines the turf battles caused by the Pentagon's new covert profile, as well as its ramifications for congressional oversight.

The doctrine of deterrence was a leading theory within the field of international security throughout the Cold War period. At one time it was regarded as social science’s most influential theoretical innovation. At least three different approaches to the study of deterrence were developed during the Cold War period. They include the game theoretical approach pioneered by Thomas Schelling in the 1960s, a psychological approach developed by Robert Jervis in the 1970s, and a case study-based approach introduced by George Alexander. As the Cold War period drew to a close, conventional deterrence theory received renewed academic attention. Scholars began to apply statistical methods of testing deterrence theory’s various empirical implications. A major conclusion reached in this research was that game theory has promising possibilities when applied to international securityoriented studies of deterrence, as deterrence involves a limited number of actors that strategically engage on the basis of respective interests. 1 Consequently, deterrence theory and game theory advanced concurrently in the 1940s. Deterrence theory, specifically nuclear deterrence, was one of the first fields to which game theory was applied in the 1940s. During this period, American strategic studies scholars had high hopes for game theory. One Pentagon analyst remarked, ‘We hope [the theory of games] will work, just as we hoped in 1942 that the atomic bomb would work.’ 2 Students of strategic studies, however, soon discovered shortcomings in early game theory. Studies of the role that nuclear deterrence played in US–Soviet relations made clear that the zero-sum game concept could not accurately characterize the Cold War period. The Cold War, on the

When, in the immediate aftermath of the appalling events of 11 September 2001, President George W. Bush declared a ‘global war on terror’, a number of pundits were deeply unhappy. At least the Pentagon has adjusted its language and now defines the West's predicament as ‘a long war’. This is better, but still problems remain: is it really a ‘war’, and if not, what is it? Who or what is it against? What is it about? How should it be conducted? Whatever we call the conflict, it is likely to be long. The use of armed force offers no short cuts, and unless used with skill and restraint it may do more harm than good. The length of its engagements, when they occur, will be measured, not in days, but in weeks or even months, and will seldom appear conclusive. It will be that most frustrating of conflicts, a war of attrition. Success, when it comes, will do so slowly and incrementally. The military may protest that this is not the kind of war that they joined up to fight, and taxpayers that they see little return ...

In January, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld submitted to Congress the Pentagon's third Quadrennial Defense Review (qdr).1 Mandated by Congress in 1996, these reviews are supposed to show how the Department of Defense will provision and enact the nation's military strategy. The 2006 iteration is the first to fully reflect the departments post-9/11 innovations and the first to encapsulate the putative lessons of the Iraq war. Nonetheless, it came and went with little controversy or even notice. The quiet passing of the 2006 QDR belies its provocative content, which sets America and its armed forces on a high-risk and costly road one more likely to lead to calamity than security. Critics of the Bush administration may find comfort in the belief that the influence of neoconservatives is waning, but the 2006 review will be part of their lasting legacy. Its influence on thinking and planning inside the U.S. armed forces will not soon fade. The 2006 review advances two new strategic vectors to guide the armed forces in their development efforts: the so-called long war against Islamic radicalism, and an increased emphasis on shaping the behavior of China by means of military "dissuasion." Both are ill-conceived. The practical effect of the first vector is to embed defense planning in an unusually broad and open-ended wartime framework. The second vector im

In 2003 the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans employed a hypothesis-based methodology to deliver the now discredited intelligence that justified the Iraq war. The 1976 ‘Team B’, which was also heavily influenced by neoconservatives and used the same methodology, has been recognized as a precedent. There is, however, another precedent, the 1998 Rumsfeld Commission, which challenged CIA predictions on the ballistic missile threat to the US. Lobbied for by many of the same conservatives and neoconservatives, the Commission used the same analytical style as Team B and the OSP. The now discredited intelligence on Iraq was not a ‘failure’ or ‘mistake’, but a method, tried and tested by the right, of challenging the CIA on political grounds.

The most recent review produced some welcome refinements in U.S. defense strategy but fell far short of its objectives, devolving into budget‐driven horse trading and raising questions about whether incumbent administrations should be required to conduct these exercises.

Under the administration of President George W. Bush, Pentagon rhetoric has increasingly articulated a more robust vision of space as a future battlefield. This analysis details some of the ongoing spending for research and development programs identified in current U.S. Air Force, Missile Defense Agency (MDA), and Defense Advanced Research and Planning Agency (DARPA) planning and budget documents related to “space control” and “space force projection.” This analysis finds that current support for “space superiority” and “space control” systems remains largely rhetorical—with little actual budgetary support. Unclassified technology development programs included in the six-year Future Years Defense Plan are a decade or more away from deployment. Programs related to offensive counterspace, space-based missile defense interceptors, and space-based strike total slightly less than $300 million in FY 2006 funding. We conclude significantly higher expenditures in research and development would be required to dev...

Although defense engagement theoretically improves bilateral relations, the experience of the former senior Pentagon official responsible for Asia shows that the inverse relationship is more common. As the U.S. reconsiders its military ties with China, expectations about near‐term progress should be modest.

Disentangling justified, unjustified, heroic, and atrocious actions on the American side of its wars remains a permanent challenge to this country's historians, public leaders, and citizens. We Americans have scarcely begun a morally mature public debate on the assaults of terrorists on us on 9/1 1 nor on our assault on Iraq in 2003. But we are almost forty years into debate over the Vietnam War, which entered the presidential campaign debates of 2004. Civilians like myself must not forget that it was to the soldiers and veterans that we owe some of our most convincing persuasion that Vietnam was the wrong war for Americans to have undertaken. Whether or not we shall ever have public consensus on reasons for the war, soldiers know that much wrong was committed by all sides. Some explicit governmental testimony to that knowledge came on March 6, 1998, in a ceremony undertaken by the Pentagon in one of the quasi-sacred sites of our national

A former Bush administration Pentagon official clears the air about the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, which set in motion far‐reaching changes designed to align U.S. strategic policy with the different realities and threats of the contemporary security environment.

On September 11, 2001, nineteen men associated with the al Qaeda terrorist network flew jet airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing 2,976 persons. In response, President Geo...

In January 2000, alQaida operatives gathered secretly in Malaysia for a planning meeting. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was watching. Among the participants was Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the hijackers who would later help to crash American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon. By the time the meeting disbanded, the CIA had taken a photograph of al-Mihdhar, learned his full name, obtained his passport number, and uncovered one other critical piece of information: alMihdhar held a multiple-entry visa to the United States.' It was twenty months before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. George Tenet, the director of central intelligence (DCI), later admitted that the CIA should have placed al-Mihdhar on the State Department's watch list denying him entry into the United States.2 It did not until August 23, 2001, just nineteen days before the terrorist attacks and months after al-Mihdhar had entered the country, obtained a California motor vehicle photo identification card (using his real name), and started taking flying lessons. The case of Khalid al-Mihdhar provides a chilling example of the subtle yet powerful effects of organization-that is, the routines, structures, and cultures that critically influence what government agencies do and how well they do it. Why did the CIA take so long to put this suspected al-Qaida operative on the State Department's watch list, especially given Director Tenet's earlier declaration that the United States was "at war" with al-Qaida, and when U.S. intelli

The 2003 American attack against Iraq was engineered by two powerful groups within the Bush Administration, the ultra-nationalists and the neo-conservatives. The ultranationalists’ motive was to gain control of the oil reserves in the Middle East and elsewhere in the region in order to gain and sustain American global primacy. While the neo-conservatives shared this objective, they also wanted a radical restructuring of geopolitical relations in the area in order to promote the long-term security of Israel. Supporting the Administration were powerful domestic constituencies, especially evangelical Christians. Opposition to the war was expressed by leaders of three professional services responsible for American security: the American army and marines, the Foreign Service, and Middle East experts in the CIA. Opponents of the war believed that there was no threat posed to the US by Iraq; they also believed that the civilian leadership of the Pentagon was not competent and that planning for securing and pacifying postwar Iraq was inadequate. The opponents of the Iraq War have proved correct.

On 11 September 2001 commercial passenger jets hijacked by suicide commandos were flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York. As the Towers imploded and collapsed, the death of several thousand people was witnessed live on television screens throughout the world. Those attacks, together with that on the Pentagon and the failed attempt that ended in Pennsylvania, aroused profound indignation and led to immediate reactions against the perpetrators or their protectors and sponsors, and more generally against international terrorism.

Professor Goodman analyses the failure of US intelligence prior to 9/11 setting the context in the 1980s and 1990s. He dissects the flaws of the CIA, FBI and the Pentagon. He argues that the State Department should be strengthened because its capabilities are the most important. He also recommends that the FBI be split in two and that the CIA's budget be disclosed.

‘It's been reliably reported,’ former US Ambassador to Chad Donald R. Norland announced during a House Africa Subcommittee hearing in April 2002, ‘that, for the first time, the two concepts—’Africa‘ and ’U.S national security’—have been used in the same sentence in Pentagon documents.’ When US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs Michael A. Westphal held a press briefing that same month, he noted that ‘fifteen per cent of the US's imported oil supply comes from sub-Saharan Africa’ and that ‘this is also a number which has the potential for increasing significantly in the next decade.’ This, Westphal explained, is the main reason that Africa matters to the United States and why ‘we do follow it very closely,’ at the Pentagon. And during his July 2002 visit to Nigeria, US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Walter Kansteiner declared that ‘African oil is of strategic national interest to us’ and ‘it will increase and become more important as we go forward.’ While American interest i...

“… Sontag not only challenges the compassion fatigue thesis; she questions the notion of the CNN effect. With regard to inaction in Bosnia despite the steady stream of images of ethnic cleansing that made their way out of Sarajevo, Sontag argues that people didn't turn off because they were either overwhelmed by their quantity or anaesthetized by their quality. Rather, they switched off because American and European leaders proclaimed it was an intractable and irresolvable situation. The political context into which the pictures were being inserted was already set, with military intervention not an option, and no amount of horrific photographs was going to change that….… In the Iraq war of 2003 imagery was central to the conflict and often the subject of conflict itself. In this context, the Pentagon's strategy of “embedding” reporters and their camera crews with fighting units, and having them operate at the behest of that unit, continues the long-running tradition of a close relationship between the media and the military…. Given this, Sontag is perhaps surprisingly sanguine about the genuineness of war photography in the contemporary period. While recognizing that many of the now iconic combat images of the pre-Vietnam period were staged, she sees Vietnam as a watershed such that “the practice of inventing dramatic news pictures, staging them for the camera, seems on its way to becoming a lost art.” Insofar as Sontag is referring to the likelihood of individual photographers seeking to deceive, she may be right. There was, however, at least one notable instance in Iraq of digital manipulation. This resulted in the Los Angeles Times sacking award-winning staff photographer Brian Walski, whose altered image of a British soldier in Basra (he had combined two photos into one to improve marginally composition) was used on the paper's front page….… What is most striking about the embedded journalists' coverage of the Iraq war is the way in which the images of the conflict produced by the allies' media was so relatively clean, being largely devoid of the dead bodies that mark a major conflict. In this outcome, the media is a willing accomplice….”

The attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 went beyond the culminating point of victory, pushed the US into declaring war on its enemies, and immediately united sections of the elite media across the world in horrified denunciation of the terrorists. The various national media usually react very differently to major international events, interpreting them according to their national interests and dispositions. However, until President Bush's State of the Union address at the end of January 2002 criticised the so-called axis of evil, condemnation of the attacks and sympathy for the US largely united those sections of the elite media in Japan, Britain, Pakistan and India, which are the subject of this essay.

Ten days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon US President George W Bush addressed a joint session of Congress. In an emotional speech he declared war on terrorism and vowed that the US would not rest until all of the perpetrators were brought to justice and A1 Qaeda destroyed. In virtually the next breath he hastened to add that the US-led campaign would not be a war on Islam, a promise Muslims might have found more reassuring had the President not sounded so much like a Baptist preacher. Whatever its propaganda value, the speech distorted the reality of the struggle facing the West while tacitly acknowledging an important truth. Since terror is merely a weapon in a larger struggle, there can be no war on terrorism per se. The West faces a counterinsurgency campaign on a global scale. Winning the hearts and minds of disaffected people in lands where terrorism thrives must be central to conducting this campaign.

The September 11 global crisis prompted by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon raises major questions concerning the nature and trajectory of terrorism in the post-Cold War global order. Hitherto, terrorism has been largely debated by analysts at the level of nation states. Terrorist and insurgent movements have also been largely anchored in nationalist and ethnic power bases even when they have sought to mobilise a transnational ideological appeal on religious or class grounds. There have been a few exceptions to this pattern such as the alliance between the German Baader-Meinhof group and the Japanese Red Army Faction, but even such international alliances as this did not, until at least the 1980s, presage anything like a global terrorist network necessitating a global strategic response. This study examines terrorism and global strategic responses.

Terrorists commit lethal acts of violence in order to realize their goals and advance their causes. They have a mixed record of success. This article explores the question whether the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon outside of Washington, D.C. were successful from the perspective of bin Laden and the Al Qaeda group. Although stunningly triumphant in exploiting the news media for their publicity goals and partially successful in advancing some of their short-term political objectives, the architects of the kamikaze attacks of 9-11 did not realize, and perhaps not even further, their ultimate desire to provoke a cataclysmic clash between Muslims and what bin Laden calls the "Zionist-Crusader" alliance. The argument here is nevertheless that from the terrorist perspective the suicide terror of 9-11 was successful in many respects and could well become an attractive model for future terrorism.

During October 1969 President Nixon directed the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to order the US high command to undertake military measures that would convey to Moscow the increased readiness of US nuclear forces but would not be 'threatening in themselves'. The JCS Readiness Test, as the exercise was officially known, was one of Nixon's more mysterious and secret decisions. This article tracks the twists and turns of Nixon's Vietnam strategy that led to the readiness test and details the Pentagon's subsequent though unenthusiastic efforts to carry out the president's wishes. The October 1969 nuclear alert and its accompanying 'madman' threats against Hanoi and Moscow sheds new light on Nixon's strategy of detente and the intricate connections between it, the Vietnam War, and continuing Cold War confrontation between the superpowers.

On 11 September 2001, four aircraft on internal flights within the United States were seized by passengers who crashed two of them into the World Trade Centre in New York and another into the Pentagon, Washington DC, the other falling into open land in Pennsylvania. The men who seized the planes were all non-US nationals. The total loss of life was over 3,000, including a number of UK citizens. The economic consequences were hardly calculable. Responsibility for the attacks was attributed to the Al Qaeda movement, a group regarded by the United States as being responsible for previous attacks against US targets, including the bombing of American embassies in East Africa in 1998 and on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. Although Al Qaeda was thought to have members in many states, the principal base for its operations was in Afghanistan.1

In January 2002, Zacarias Moussaoui, a French national of Moroccan descent, pleaded not guilty in Virginia federal court to six counts of conspiring to commit acts of international terrorism in connection with the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. In other times, it would have seemed unremarkable for someone charged with conspiring to murder American citizens and destroy American property on American soil to be tried in a U.S. civilian court. More than two centuries ago, Article I, Section 8, Clause 10 of the United States Constitution granted Congress the power to "define and punish Piracies, Felonies committed on the High Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations," a power that Congress immediately exercised by criminalizing piracy, the eighteenth-century version of modern terrorism. Since then, Congress has criminalized numerous other international offenses. In recent decades, United States courts have decided criminal cases convicting international hijackers, terrorists, and drug smugglers, as well as a string of well-publicized civil lawsuits adjudicating gross human rights violations. Most pertinent, federal prosecutors have successfully tried and convicted in U.S. courts numerous members of Al Qaeda, the very terrorist group charged with planning the September 11 attacks, for earlier attacks on the World Trade Center and the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

The September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were a watershed in strategic development and international relations, marking the end of the post–Cold War era. It was an era in which there was only one superpower and much uncertainty about the direction of global developments because the superpower had no agenda. A Global Coalition against International Ter orism

The United States needs military forces sufficient to deter, and possibly even fight, wars in two places at the same time. But the Pentagon's current two-war concept - under which the US would send more than half a million troops to each of two all-out wars that began nearly simultaneously and overlapped in time - is excessive. Under a more realistic approach, the United States would plan for only a single all-out war that included a prompt massive ground offensive to overthrow an enemy government and occupy its territory. In a second possible war, it would rely more heavily on air-power in the early going - or on naval power, in the case of war in the Taiwan Strait. It would also rely more on key allies.

During the first week of its new term in office, the administration of President Barack Obama not only surprised but also thrilled many progressives when the Pentagon rescinded its long-standing ba...