The Role of Turkish Drones in Azerbaijan’s Increasing Military Effectiveness: An Assessment of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War

This study focuses on Turkey as a rising drone power in the international arena in recent years. In this context, the article will scrutinize the case of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, which broke out on September 27, 2020. The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, one of the frozen problems in the Caucasus region, was ended in favor of Azerbaijan less than two months later. Turkey took on a game-changing role in the region by supplying its ally Azerbaijan with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for use in the conflict, and significantly contributed to Azerbaijan’s victory. Turkey’s political, diplomatic, and military contributions to Azerbaijan will likely be discussed on the global agenda for years to come; this study will contribute to the literature on the role and impact of Turkey’s military support, especially its drones, on Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh victory.

The Arab Military and American Foreign Policy

A review of "Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness" by Kenneth M. Pollack

Day and Night Leisure Routines and Regimes

The chapter assesses disjunctures between military routines and patterns of leisure and nightlife in the cities of the eastern Mediterranean. Military authorities attempted to control the desires of their subordinates to escape from the confines of the camp through the provision of leisure activities intended to boost military effectiveness. Many servicemen, however, continued their pursuit of pleasure in the nocturnal city, stimulating a flourishing of entertainment venues that came to occupy a major place in the topography of the imagined Levantine city. The chapter finally considers how military time-keeping regimes were extended to the city through the control of licensing hours and lighting in a failed attempt to silence and extinguish the night.

Coups and Mutinies

The violent and sudden overthrow of governments has caught the attention of many scholars from various disciplines and placed the incidence of coups at the center of such studies. The result is the emergence of a rich literature that has used a multitude of methods and factors to explain the incidence of coups and control of the military. Although the interest in the incidence of coups and coup-proofing has waxed and waned depending on the waves of democratization and occurrence of the coups, the literature continues to evolve as the recent scholarship has introduced different variables to understand coups. Parallel with coup research, scholars also have started to look into the other ways that a military interferes in politics as well as the impact of coups on other issues, such as democratization and military effectiveness. A military can interfere in politics in subtle ways, which can be within the bounds of the legal order of the state. What is more, even if the military engages in direct disobedience, such as mutinies, these acts do not necessarily turn into an attempt to overthrow the government. Thus military mutinies have started to draw attention. Especially the impact of loyalty and disobedience of militaries on the success and failure of civil unrest has become an important research area following the Arab Spring, and the effects of past coups, the threat of coups, and coup-proofing on other issues, such as democratization and military effectiveness, have become another research avenue within the literature. This literature focuses on how coups and coup-proofing have an overarching effect on the militaries and the political structure of states. The fear of coups can shape the democratization path and the choices that decision makers have. It has a direct impact on military policies, which can end up decreasing military effectiveness. Therefore, this article mainly focuses on the recent scholarship to present the most recent debates in the field. To this end, in the first section, the article presents a list of articles that present a general overview of the field and how the debates have changed over the years. In the second section, we will focus on the various ways that a military interferes with politics and debates on Controlling the Military. The third section delves into the causes of coups and presents a wide range of factors and approaches in understanding coups. The fourth section focuses on the overlooked aspect of military behavior: mutinies and rebellions. The fifth section brings all the previous sections together and investigates the impact of coups and rebellions on Democratization and Military Effectiveness. The final section provides an overview of the Datasets on coups and military participation in politics.

Introduction

This chapter sketches out the characteristics of today's global security environment in a broad brush by describing the US Department of Defense. It focuses on the science of war, a subdiscipline of defense analysis that, beginning with a foundation of basic facts and figures about military organizations and operations, uses analytical methods to tackle key questions in the national security field. With this context, the chapter illustrates the analytical methods including simple computational algorithms for assessing military effectiveness and predicting combat outcomes. It also includes the study of defense budgets and economics, as well as efforts to understand the physics and technology of military weapons and operations today. The chapter then discusses many of the ABCs of the US armed forces. It explains the evolution of American grand strategy — the theory of the case for how the nation should ensure its safety, prosperity, and survival — that these forces are designed to undergird.

Review of: K. Pollack. Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness

The review analyzes the recent book written by an American military expert and political scientist Kenneth Pollack and entitled Armies of the Sand: Past, Present and Future of the Effectiveness of Arab Armies. The author of the monograph has been studying Arab armies and Middle East conflicts for more than 30 years and had previously published several papers that consider the military organization of different countries in the region. In this book, Pollak seeks to summarize long-standing discussions that consider the reasons for the low military effectiveness of the Arab armies after the Second World War. The author consistently examines four principal arguments that seek to explain the reasons for the failures of the Arab armies on the battlefield (the influence of the Soviet military doctrine, politicization, the level of socio-economic development, culture). For each of the hypotheses, Pollack selects the most representative examples from the history of military operations carried out by the Arab armies after 1945. In doing so the researcher tries to prove or disprove the hypotheses. To better substantiate his conclusions Pollack also examines whether non-Arab armies that presumably faced the same difficulties as the Arab ones also performed poorly on the battlefield. The author concludes that Arab culture has been the most influential factor that prevented Arab armies from winning wars.

How leaders’ experiences and rebellion shape military recruitment during civil war

The use of forced recruitment strategies during war can adversely affect military effectiveness and human rights. Given these costs, under what conditions do state leaders adopt coercive recruitment during civil wars? We find that between 1980 and 2009, states changed their recruitment practices 140 times during civil wars – half of which were towards coercive recruitment. Since structuralist explanations focus on factors that remain more or less constant over time, they cannot explain the frequency of these changes. Instead, we focus on individual-level factors and argue that leaders’ dispositions as risk-takers determine their beliefs about using force to solve collective action dilemmas during civil wars. Further, conflict context matters for leaders’ recruitment decisions – when rebel groups engage in coercive recruitment, leaders may also feel more justified in using such strategies. Using the LEAD Dataset and data on recruitment, we find that risk-tolerant leaders, including those who have had careers in the security sector, as well as those who have prior experience as a rebel or revolutionary leader, are more likely to use force to increase recruitment. While we theorize that this effect may be mitigated by combat experience, the evidence is mixed. Lastly, we find that rebels’ use of forced recruitment makes state leaders less likely to use voluntary recruitment.

21 years of Polish military NATO membership - glass half empty

After the accession to NATO, Polish military should have adapted to new realities but the process coincided with changes of the security environment and NATO strategic reorientation. In order to meet expectations and contribute to Allied requirements, Polish Armed Forces faced the dilemma of keeping balance between transformation, the forces numerical decrease and modernization of the inventory. Due to the choice of direction with the focus on the capability problems, the change has not brought expected effect until now. Applying existing terminology and notions, the article examines discrepancy between perceptions of the NATO accession and the state of the military effectiveness in the face of deepening Polish - American military strategic partnership.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter synthesizes insights from the individual chapters, identifying six overarching lessons: civilian control of the US military is complex and understudied; norms are essential for healthy civil-military relations; the relationship between society and the military is less than healthy; partisanship is corroding civil-military relations; public scrutiny of the military is essential to military effectiveness; and the fundamental character of civil-military relations is changing. In turn, it proposes several questions for future research, suggesting that more could be known about public accountability of military activity; the nature and measurement of military politicization; and changing actors and roles in civil-military relations.