Definition, diagnosis, therapy: A civil-military critique
For more than two generations, civil–military relations has been an arena with very little autonomous theoretical development – if by theory we mean explanation based on tests of hypotheses. Since formative concepts were offered by Samuel Huntington, Morris Janowitz, and Samuel Finer, configurative descriptions and historical summaries have prevailed. While the role of “threat” has been examined, wider issues of national security competence have been explored, and some ideas such as that of a “civil army” have been introduced, we can count on the fingers of one hand the number of scholars who have written about civil–military relations qua theory. Yet, if we define conservaDefense & Security Analysis Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 157–170, 2002
Beyond Defense Planning
When the World Trade Center towers were destroyed by terrorists and more than three thousand people died, old notions of defense planning collapsed as well. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld noted, the United States’ defenses were not designed to protect an American city from a civilian U.S. airliner that departed from a domestic airport. He might have said, with equal veracity, that one cannot “plan” for the unimaginable. The term “defense planning” evokes two misconceptions. The first of these conceptual problems lies in the notion of “planning,” while the second concerns the idea of “defense.” To begin to address these misconceptions means putting an end to our inability to envision alternative defense planning systems that could be public, transparent, and plural. To plan is to outline, conceive, prepare—all of which connote static assumptions about future scenarios. Herein lies one problem with the notion of defense planning, since any effort to anticipate anything beyond the most proximate threat scenarios is fraught with uncertainty. Defense planning qua “defendology”—a compulsive devotion to, and de facto ideology of, preparation for war—is often equated with the processes of modernizing and westernizing armed forces.2 Yet, at the core of early 21century defense planning lies the real dilemma of whether or not “defense” is what defense planning in this age is all about. In the following pages, such a conceptual dilemma is discussed, after which some of the implications of this intellectual debate are considered. In brief, I argue that NATO —and other alliances, ministries, or other large organizations generally—are preoccupied, almost to the point of compulsiveness, with the “Maginot Line mentality” of planning, and have great difficulty grasping the notion of “de-planning.” Such a mentality focuses on what is already in place, and therefore must be supported. Even if a particular element of strategy or an item
A sustainable development indicator for NGOs and international organisations
The article offers an easy-to-use indicator for measuring whether NGOs, international organisations and government policies and projects meet the criteria for sustainable development that have been established by the Rio Declaration in 1992 and that are recognised by experts in the field. Use of this indicator reveals that most of the major actors in the field of development are actually failing to promote sustainable development and points to the specific areas where they need to improve in order to fulfil sustainability criteria. We also offer a sample test of the indicator using UNICEF as a case study.