Statesmen, Soldiers, and Strategy: The Influence of Civil-Military Relations on U.S. National Security Decision-Making
Statesmen, Soldiers, and Strategy: The Influence of Civil-Military Relations on U.S. National Security Decision-Making
Making strategy: Civil–military relations after Iraq
The conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have revealed the problems that both the United States and Britain confront in formulating strategy. In part this problem is intellectual: strategy is not just about the unilateral implementation of policy, it is also a process applicable in the dynamic and multilateral context of war. However, the difficulties are also institutional. Encumbered with unrealistic models of civil–military relations, the United States and the United Kingdom have allowed their machineries for the making of strategy to atrophy.
The Internet and the Changing Beijing-Taipei Relations: Toward Unification or Fragmentation?
Information and its technologies facilitate the exercise of what has been called “soft power,” a concept that differentiates information from the conventional dimensions of “hard power,” which is mainly associated with military force and economic influence. Soft power, according to Nye, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense of the United States, means that “A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness. In this sense it is just as important to set the agenda in world politics and attract others as it is to force them to change through the threat or use of military or economic weapons.”1