The Belarusian Case of Transition: Whither Financial Repression?

The present paper examines the financial development of Belarus over the past decade with a particular focus on 1996-2002, when the financial sector was restrained through pervasive government controls in the form of interest rate ceilings, directed credit and preferential loans schemes, high reserve requirements, multiple exchange rates and capital controls. Belarus is of particular interest, as, despite no economic restructuring, the growth has averaged seven per cent per annum since 1997. While explanations of this ‘miracle’ abound, no empirical work has been done on the role of the financial system, particularly on the effects of pervasive government intervention. It has been argued that monetary stimulation of investment activity through interest rate ceilings and directed credit and preferential loans revived growth. This paper investigates whether financial policy led to financial deepening and increased the share of savings to be allocated to investment.

Maintaining Effective Deterrence

While deterrence is as old as human conflict itself, it became particularly important with the advent of nuclear weapons when armed conflict between the superpowers had the potential to end civilization. Today there is a sense that terrorism has rendered deterrence obsolete and forced the United States to substitute preemption for it. The author illustrates that strategic reality is not simple. Instead, the two are inextricable. He provides both a conceptual framework for understanding deterrence or, more accurately, the psychology of deterrence and policy guidance on how the United States can most effectively use it. The author concludes that an adaptable and flexible military with robust landpower is the only tool that can maintain deterrence.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1786/thumbnail.jp

Defining and Achieving Decisive Victory

The author explores the concept of victory in the war in terrorism, but he does so by placing it within the larger currents of change that are sweeping the global security environment. He contends that the time-tested idea of decisive victory is still an important one, but must be designed very carefully in this dangerous new world. To do so correctly can provide the foundation for an effective strategy. To fail to do so could be the first step toward strategic defeat.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1822/thumbnail.jp

Thucydides Was Right: Defining the Future Threat

To define future threat is, in a sense, an impossible task, yet it is one that must be done. The only sources of empirical evidence accessible are the past and the present; one cannot obtain understanding about the future from the future. The author draws upon the understanding of strategic history obtainable from Thucydides’ great History of the Peloponnesian War. He advises prudence as the operating light for American definition of future threat, and believes that there are historical parallels between the time of Thucydides and our own that can help us avoid much peril. The future must always be unpredictable to us in any detail, but the many and potent continuities in history’s great stream of time can serve to alert us to what may well happen in kind.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1457/thumbnail.jp

What Should the U.S. Army Learn From History? Recovery From a Strategy Deficit

Does history repeat itself? This monograph clearly answers “no,” firmly. However, it does not argue that an absence of repetition in the sense of analogy means that history can have no utility for the soldier today. This monograph argues for a “historical parallelism,” in place of shaky or false analogy. The past, even the distant and ancient past, provides evidence of the potency of lasting virtues of good conduct. This monograph concludes by offering four recommendations: 1) Behave prudently. 2) Remember the concept of the great stream of time. 3) Do not forget that war nearly always is a gamble. 4) War should only be waged with strategic sense.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1408/thumbnail.jp

Making Strategic Sense of Cyber Power: Why the Sky Is Not Falling

View the Executive SummaryCyber is now recognized as an operational domain, but the theory that should explain it strategically is, for the most part, missing. It is one thing to know how to digitize; it is quite another to understand what digitization means strategically. The author maintains that, although the technical and tactical literature on cyber is abundant, strategic theoretical treatment is poor. He offers four conclusions: (1) cyber power will prove useful as an enabler of joint military operationsl; (2) cyber offense is likely to achieve some success, and the harm we suffer is most unlikely to be close to lethally damaging; (3) cyber power is only information and is only one way in which we collect, store, and transmit information; and, (4) it is clear enough today that the sky is not falling because of cyber peril. As a constructed environment, cyberspace is very much what we choose to make it. Once we shed our inappropriate awe of the scientific and technological novelty and wonder of it all, we ought to have little trouble realizing that as a strategic challenge we have met and succeeded against the like of networked computers and their electrons before. The whole record of strategic history says: Be respectful of, and adapt for, technical change, but do not panic.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1528/thumbnail.jp

Always Strategic: Jointly Essential Landpower

View the Executive SummaryAmerican Landpower is a strategic instrument of state policy and needs to be considered as such. This monograph explores and explains the nature of Landpower, both in general terms and also with particular regard to the American case. The monograph argues that: (1) Landpower is unique in the character of the quality it brings to the American joint team for national security; (2) the U.S. has a permanent need for the human quality in Landpower that this element provides inherently; (3) Landpower is always and, indeed, necessarily strategic in its meaning and implications—it is a quintessentially strategic instrument of state policy and politics; (4) strategic Landpower is unavoidably and beneficially joint in its functioning, this simply is so much the contemporary character of American strategic Landpower that we should consider jointness integral to its permanent nature; and, (5) notwithstanding the nuclear context since 1945, Landpower retained, indeed retains, most of the strategic utility it has possessed through all of history: this is a prudent judgment resting empirically on the evidence of 70 years’ experience. In short, the strategic Landpower maintained today safely can be assumed to be necessary for security long into the future. No matter how familiar the concept of strategic Landpower is when identified and expressed thus, it is a physical and psychological reality that has persisted to strategic effect through all of the strategic history to which we have access.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1466/thumbnail.jp

Transformation and Strategic Surprise

The current process of military transformation will enable the Armed Forces to do better what they already do superbly well. It is important to excel at decisive maneuver and in the application of precise, yet overwhelming firepower. But those attributes, though key in warfare against regular enemies, tend to be less valuable in conflict with irregulars. In war after war, the United States has been surprised by the poor political reward it has earned for its military effort. The IT-led transformation will do nothing to help correct the persisting American difficulty in functioning strategically and politically in its conduct of war. The author develops a cumulative seven-point argument.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1750/thumbnail.jp

Categorical Confusion? The Strategic Implications of Recognizing Challenges Either as Irregular or Traditional

Strategic theory should educate to enable effective strategic practice, but much of contemporary theory promotes confusion, not clarity, of suitable understanding. A little strategic theory goes a long way, at least it does if it is austere and focused on essentials. Unfortunately, contemporary strategic conceptualization in the U.S. defense community is prolix, over-elaborate, and it confuses rather than clarifies. Recent debate about irregular, as contrasted allegedly with traditional, challenges to U.S. national security have done more harm than good. Conceptualization of and for an operational level of war can imperil the truly vital nexus between strategy and tactics. In much the same way, the invention of purportedly distinctive categories of challenge endangers the relationship between general theory for statecraft, war, and strategy, and strategic and tactical practice for particular historical cases. It is not helpful to sort challenges into supposedly distinctive categories. But, if such categorization proves politically or bureaucratically unavoidable, its potential for harm can be reduced by firm insistence upon the authority of the general theory of strategy.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1560/thumbnail.jp

Defense Planning for National Security: Navigation Aids for the Mystery Tour

View the Executive SummaryThe challenge that is defense planning includes: educated futurology and the humanities as methodological approaches; futurists and scenarios, trend spotting and defense analysis; the impossibility of science in studying the future; the impossibility of verification by empirical testing of hypotheses; the value of the humanities which are politics, strategy, and history for defense planning; the use and misuse of analogy; learning from history; why and how strategic history works; and recommendations for the Army. What can be learned from history and what cannot are discussed in this analysis.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1506/thumbnail.jp