Detecting the need for change : how the British Army adapted to warfare on the Western Front and in the Southern Cameroons

This article addresses a gap in the literature on military adaptation by focusing on the first step in the adaptive process: detecting failure. We argue that institutionalised feedback loops are a critical mechanism for facilitating detection. Feedback loops are most effective when they filter information and distribute lessons learned to senior tactical commanders. In turn, effective filtration depends on incorporating frontline soldiers and specialists into intelligence cells while creating a protected space for dissent. We evaluate our theory against both irregular and conventional wars fought by the British Army: the counterinsurgency campaign in the Southern Cameroons (1960–1) as well as the evolution of British assault tactics on the Western Front of the First World War (1914–18).PostprintPeer reviewe

Measuring the landscape of civil war : evaluating geographic coding decisions with historic data from the Mau Mau rebellion

This research has been supported by grants from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (FA9550-09-1-0314) and the Department of Defense Minerva Initiative through the Office of Naval Research (N00014-14-0071).Subnational conflict research increasingly utilizes georeferenced event datasets to understand contentious politics and violence. Yet, how exactly locations are mapped to particular geographies, especially from unstructured text sources such as newspaper reports and archival records, remains opaque and few best practices exist for guiding researchers through the subtle but consequential decisions made during geolocation. We begin to address this gap by developing a systematic approach to georeferencing that articulates the strategies available, empirically diagnoses problems of bias created by both the data-generating process and researcher-controlled tasks, and provides new generalizable tools for simultaneously optimizing both the recovery and accuracy of coordinates. We then empirically evaluate our process and tools against new microlevel data on the Mau Mau Rebellion (Colonial Kenya 1952-1960), drawn from 20,000 pages of recently declassified British military intelligence reports. By leveraging a subset of this data that includes map codes alongside natural language location descriptions, we demonstrate how inappropriately georeferencing data can have important downstream consequences in terms of systematically biasing coefficients or altering statistical significance and how our tools can help alleviate these problems.PostprintPeer reviewe

Military loyalty and the failure of democratization in Africa : how ethnic armies shape the capacity of presidents to defy term limits

The military plays a crucial role in furthering or hindering democratization in Africa. Beyond direct intervention through coups, armies more subtly and perniciously condition the political trajectory of states through their loyalty. Leaders who can rely on unwavering military support for protection against internal unrest face fewer risks and greater chances of success in rolling back liberalization and entrenching authoritarian practices. Constructing ethnic armies, which tie the fate of soldiers to the regime, is a profoundly powerful way to affect such loyalty. Through a mixed methods analysis of presidential bids to challenge term limits, including a paired comparison of Senegal and Cameroon, I demonstrate that ethnic armies triple the chances of success and, in so doing, encourage defiance in the first place: 82% of presidents back by ethnic armies attempt to defy their constitutions and extend their hold on power, as opposed to 31% of other leaders. Conversely, ethnically diverse armies are far more likely to defend constitutional politics and constrain leaders to abide by term limits. The ethnic composition of the military thus critically shapes the prospects for African liberalization.PostprintPeer reviewe

Design and Analysis of Cognitive Interviews for Comparative Multinational Testing

This article summarizes the work of the Comparative Cognitive Testing Workgroup, an international coalition of survey methodologists interested in developing an evidence-based methodology for examining the comparability of survey questions within cross-cultural or multinational contexts. To meet this objective, it was necessary to ensure that the cognitive interviewing (CI) method itself did not introduce method bias. Therefore, the workgroup first identified specific characteristics inherent in CI methodology that could undermine the comparability of CI evidence. The group then developed and implemented a protocol addressing those issues. In total, 135 cognitive interviews were conducted by participating countries. Through the process, the group identified various interpretive patterns resulting from sociocultural and language-related differences among countries as well as other patterns of error that would impede comparability of survey data

Military maladaptation : counterinsurgency and the politics of failure

Tactical learning is critical to battlefield success, especially in a counterinsurgency. This article tests the existing model of military adaption against a ‘most-likely’ case: the British Army’s counterinsurgency in the Southern Cameroons (1960–61). Despite meeting all preconditions thought to enable adaptation – decentralization, leadership turnover, supportive leadership, poor organizational memory, feedback loops, and a clear threat – the British still failed to adapt. Archival evidence suggests politicians subverted bottom-up adaptation, because winning came at too high a price in terms of Britain’s broader strategic imperatives. Our finding identifies an important gap in the extant adaptation literature: it ignores politics.PostprintPeer reviewe

Polygenic Risk Scores for Prediction of Breast Cancer and Breast Cancer Subtypes

Stratification of women according to their risk of breast cancer based on polygenic risk scores (PRSs) could improve screening and prevention strategies. Our aim was to develop PRSs, optimized for prediction of estrogen receptor (ER)-specific disease, from the largest available genome-wide association dataset and to empirically validate the PRSs in prospective studies. The development dataset comprised 94,075 case subjects and 75,017 control subjects of European ancestry from 69 studies, divided into training and validation sets. Samples were genotyped using genome-wide arrays, and single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were selected by stepwise regression or lasso penalized regression. The best performing PRSs were validated in an independent test set comprising 11,428 case subjects and 18,323 control subjects from 10 prospective studies and 190,040 women from UK Biobank (3,215 incident breast cancers). For the best PRSs (313 SNPs), the odds ratio for overall disease per 1 standard deviation in ten prospective studies was 1.61 (95%CI: 1.57-1.65) with area under receiver-operator curve (AUC) = 0.630 (95%CI: 0.628-0.651). The lifetime risk of overall breast cancer in the top centile of the PRSs was 32.6%. Compared with women in the middle quintile, those in the highest 1% of risk had 4.37- and 2.78-fold risks, and those in the lowest 1% of risk had 0.16- and 0.27-fold risks, of developing ER-positive and ER-negative disease, respectively. Goodness-of-fit tests indicated that this PRS was well calibrated and predicts disease risk accurately in the tails of the distribution. This PRS is a powerful and reliable predictor of breast cancer risk that may improve breast cancer prevention programs.NovartisEli Lilly and CompanyAstraZenecaAbbViePfizer UKCelgeneEisaiGenentechMerck Sharp and DohmeRocheCancer Research UKGovernment of CanadaArray BioPharmaGenome CanadaNational Institutes of HealthEuropean CommissionMinistère de l'Économie, de l’Innovation et des Exportations du QuébecSeventh Framework ProgrammeCanadian Institutes of Health Researc

The strategy project : teaching strategic thinking through crisis simulation

In an effort to teach strategic thinking, the Center for International Security Studies at Princeton University designed an adaptable model for crisis simulation that could be used in a variety of institutional contexts and with diverse content matter. Moreover, the simulation helped students to develop an understanding of several other important abstract concepts in political science: notably, information uncertainty, friction or "the fog of war," and bureaucratic stove piping. This article describes the design, content, and implementation of our original simulation. It is based on a "loose-nukes" scenario resulting from the hypothetical collapse of the Pakistani state. We conclude by evaluating the benefits and limitations of the simulation and by suggesting ways in which it could be implemented in other institutional contexts.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The ethnic stacking in Africa dataset:when leaders use ascriptive identity to build military loyalty

Ethnicity has played a core role in the construction of African security institutions, with leaders often relying on coethnics to secure military loyalty. Such practices, termed ethnic stacking, likely have profound consequences for a range of important outcomes, from combat effectiveness to coup propensity to democratization. The Ethnic Stacking in Africa Dataset provides the first comprehensive data on the ethnic stacking practices of all African countries, from independence to 2018 (with 95.7% of leaders and 98.3% of country years recovered). This new data will allow scholars to better understand African militaries and their behavior and capabilities