The Blue Pacific is far from monolithic—diverse in its politics, regime types, degrees of sovereignty, and ways of thinking about strategy. Given its bigger-than-continental scale, it could hardly be otherwise. And there are problematic sub-regional cleavages among...
I was just about to block "Afghanistan" as a key word in my Twitter timeline when I saw several people asking why British conservatives were even more freaked out about the U.S. withdrawal from...
I was asked by a participating member of the H-Diplo/ISSF network to review The American Culture of War. Here is the original link to my review, but it’s off in some far corner of the internet, so I...
Over the past few weeks we’ve had to endure military brass and top government officials falling over themselves to condemn American GIs – first for urinating on dead Afghans, and more recently for...
And this week, in problematic-representations-of-indigenous-populations-on-children's-television, Lucasfilm brings you Nomad Droids: Well I guess some foreign policy subtext in TV for eight-year-olds is a step up from 99.7% of what's on American prime-time. Thanks to Clone Wars, my kid is quickly becoming fluent in such concepts as strategic depth, diversionary warfare and humanitarian mission creep. Last week he learned, for example, that real soldiers treat disaster relief as an annoying distraction from their actual job; that, though not bothering to understand what the locals need might...
Mission: Readiness, a collection of retired generals, admirals and other senior military officers issued their latest report this week and the accompanying press release should draw the attention of IR scholars interested in the Copenhagen School and securitization: "Childhood Obesity Endangers National Security." The news was particularly bad for my state: ...obesity rates among children and young adults in Kentucky are significantly higher than the national average. Weight problems have become the leading medical reason why young adults are unable to serve in the military, both in Kentucky...
On the road home from South Carolina I posted notice of Laura Sjoberg's critique of militarized masculinity in her analysis of DADT-repeal discourse. Now that I'm settled in, I've realized it's the comments thread on that post where the real action is and I feel compelled to throw in my two cents.Laura's key argument:That the military now includes gay people and (kind of) women openly does not mean that it is some how gender-equal or gender neutral. Instead, masculinity remains the standard of good soldiering in the United States military. Celebrating the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell the...
The repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is official now, signed by the President and a celebration of what is, by most accounts, an incredibly productive lame-duck Congressional session. It is certainly, in my mind, high time that this both on-face ridiculous and insidiously discriminatory policy make its way out of United States law and military practice. It is also, in my mind, just plain stupid the ways in which the United States does not recognize people it perceives to be homosexual as full citizens of the state; the repeal of one of them is a sign that maybe that will be (if slowly)...
In my U.S. Foreign Policy class this semester, students read the latest book from historian Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008). As in his prior work, Bacevich is critical of the apparent militarism in American foreign policy. Primarily, he argues that the U.S. is too willing to use military force as an instrument of policy and that the American people and its leaders overestimate the effectiveness of military power.Arguably, another indicator of American militarism is its willingness to place former top military leaders into security policy posts...
When I heard that the "Hurt Locker," a drama set in the midst of the Iraq War, was nominated for several Oscars, I was intrigued. Americans have not shown much interest as a people in either of the current official wars and even less interest in documentaries about and dramas set in these conflicts. My initial hunch was that this film, was selected to balance out "Avatar", the narrative of which clearly questions militarism and imperialism (while also reveling in astounding levels of mindless violence). So I assumed that "The Hurt Locker" would make a conservative counter-argument which...
Back in September, I blogged about the new Northern Command, which oversees deployment of an Army Brigade Combat Team inside the US -- putting active American troops on the homeland for the first time since 1878 (other than during national emergency). The recent post was a somewhat paranoid followup to one I wrote on July 4, 2007, about NSPD 51. That White House security directive asserts presidential leadership of government during catastrophic emergency. By the standards of the directive, the US arguably had two such emergencies during the Bush years (9/11 and Hurricane Katrina)....
Just about anyone who follows American foreign policy understands the predictable early U.S. responses to a global crisis. The Navy is asked to dispatch vessels into nearby seas -- thereby signaling American interests, power and resolve. Or so the thinking goes.These deployments are certainly cheaper than direct involvement in a crisis and rarely lead to any kind of active (hostile) U.S. military operations.Since 2001, however, the U.S. has developed a Global Strike Task Force (GSTF) that seems to offer a fundamentally new approach to handling crisis. USAF General John Jumper (then the...