Search

State investments in domestic defence industries are one of the most puzzling trends in international relations. Economists contend that these investments waste resources, while political scientists claim that armaments' resultant overproduction fuels arms races. Why then do governments cultivate defence industries? I draw on cases from Israel, South Africa and Iraq to argue that the answers to these questions are distinct. Fears about supply security frequently spur states to begin developing arms industries, and elites' techno-nationalist beliefs often sustain their defence-industrial investments. Defence industries' primary national security value, however, lies in their hitherto unappreciated contribution to states' military adaptation capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During revolutions, strategic interactions among civilian policy makers, armed forces, and opposition groups shape political outcomes—most important, whether a regime stands or falls. Students from advanced industrial democracies frequently find these dynamics counterintuitive, even after completing readings and engaging in traditional instruction methods. We therefore sought to improve pedagogical outcomes by designing a simulation based on scenarios similar to those witnessed during the Arab Spring and Ukraine's Euromaidan Revolution. We divided students into four teams representing the regime, the armed forces, and two distinct groups of anti-regime dissidents. Rules were designed to incorporate the best recent scholarship on each category of actors' behavior, such as the probability of military units defecting to protesters and the ability of riot police to repress urban uprisings. By forcing student teams to make decisions under time pressure, we obliged them to wrestle with the uncertainties and fears of betrayal inherent in complex civil–military emergencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No issue deserves more scrutiny than the mechanisms whereby popular unrest unleashes civil wars. We argue that one institution – two-tiered security systems – is particularly pernicious in terms of the accompanying civil war risk. These systems' defining characteristic is the juxtaposition of small communally stacked units that protect regimes from internal adversaries with larger regular armed forces that deter external opponents. These systems aggravate civil war risks because stacked security units lack the size to repress widespread dissent, but inhibit rapid regime change through coup d'état. Regular militaries, meanwhile, fracture when ordered to employ force against populations from which they were recruited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few innovations have marked the late-20th and early-21st centuries more than unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones. Drones' current preeminence leads many to assume that their development was teleologically determined by technological advances. The empirical record, however, belies such assumptions and is filled with vicissitudes. The Air Force's and Naval aviation's pilot-dominated hierarchies never prioritized drones over manned aircraft of their own accord. Politicians, meanwhile, lacked the expertise to judge what technologies could achieve and therefore could not compel the military to embrace drones. It was, thus, competition from other organizations – the CIA, the Navy's surface warfare community and the Army –that obliged reluctant aviators to embrace drones. My study's key original finding is that inter-agency competition impels militaries to embrace technologies that they would otherwise reject. Warfare's evolution means that non-military bodies – intelligence agencies, interior ministries and paramilitary forces – develop capabilities that rival those of traditional military services in specific domains and these organizations can prove more agile at adopting certain new technologies because of their flatter organizational structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few factors have a greater impact on the international distribution of power than states' ability to develop and produce sophisticated weaponry. The Israeli and Swedish cases demonstrate the constraints and opportunities for small states' defense-industrial bases in a globalizing world. The changing nature of arms production-including mounting weapons costs, globalized supply chains and the rise of multinational defense corporations-forced governments to reevaluate their defense-industrial policies. In each case, governments abandoned the pursuit of defense-industrial self-sufficiency and adopted export-dependent defenseindustrial policies. National strategies differ, however, with Sweden embracing foreign direct investment (FDI) to support incremental innovation and Israel encouraging companies to tap venture capital in pursuit of disruptive innovations. After a decade of sustained growth, the Israeli and Swedish defense-industrial bases today arguably suffer from structural weaknesses rooted in the adaptation policies each state adopted in prior decades and, more particularly, how each encouraged exports and drew on new forms of investment capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalisation is transforming the production of armaments in ways poorly understood, yet critical to states' security. Most analysts contend that this process forces states to converge upon laissez-faire policies that systematically disadvantage smaller states. However, broader research in comparative political economy suggests that domestic institutions drive states to adapt in distinct ways independently of their size. Indeed, the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) approach argues that national institutions shape both how states develop adjustment strategies and their firms' comparative advantages. This article examines two small states – Israel and Sweden – to ascertain whether defence-industrial transformation drives them to converge upon common laissez-faire policies or, contrarily, whether distinct VoC shaped their adaptation strategies along different lines. To preview the conclusions, institutions impel states to respond to defence-industrial transformation in divergent ways. Liberal market states, such as Israel, respond by introducing greater competition for contracts and liberalising their import/export policies. In coordinated market states, such as Sweden, government cooperates with business groups to selectively open industries to foreign capital and position them to compete globally. Although they adapt differently to transformation's common challenge, these cases demonstrate that even small states can retain robust defence-industrial bases, albeit ones with increasingly distinct comparative advantages and disadvantages. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Few issues are more important to scholars of security studies than understanding the impact of state sponsorship on the capabilities of non-state armed actors. The subject of our study—Lebanon's Hezbollah—was selected based on its reputation amongst scholars and policymakers alike as an exceptionally capable organization. In our inquiry, we seek to answer the following questions about Hezbollah's rapid emergence during the 1980s as one of the world's premier armed non-state actors: (a) how did Iranian sponsorship contribute to Hezbollah's effectiveness?; and (b) to what extent did Hezbollah's success depend on characteristics endogenous to the organization itself? To preview our conclusions, state sponsorship can contribute markedly to non-state actors' capabilities by providing resources and sanctuary. However, the ultimate effectiveness of non-state armed groups depends heavily on such internal characteristics as their decision-making processes and members' backgrounds. Thus, while state support may be necessary for non-state actors to achieve their goals, it is insufficient as a guarantee of their effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]