The Impact of War on U.S. Army Leader Self-Development Domain in the Early 21st Century

This qualitative research examines senior U.S. Army officer leaders’ propensity and appreciation to engage in self-devolvement and to develop their junior leaders. The research compares what the Army is prescribing to its leaders with what they are actually saying and doing. It focuses on the decade before the Global War on Terrorism, during the high-tempo war period, and the last ten years. We find that the past 19 years of war have impacted the U.S. Army in countless ways. One is arguably on its most precious capability—its active officer leaders. As the Army rose to war-related challenges, it did so at leader-development costs. Little time, focus, and a battle environment left developing others and oneself low on the list of priorities. Less officer nurturing in the past will have an amplified and harmful effect in the near and distant future; unless, of course, the Army understands its self-development state-of-affairs today and takes action to bolster adult learning. It is no longer a question of if the Army wants to develop its leadership seed-corn, but if they can

An Exploration of Correct Voting in Recent U.S. Presidential Elections

Lau and Redlawsk (1997) proposed that the quality of voter decision making can be evaluated by measuring what they called correct voting—the extent to which people vote in accordance with their own values and priorities—but in so doing provided little guidance about what actually determines whether voters can make such high-quality decisions. This article develops a framework for analyzing the vote decision that views the quality of decision making as a joint function of individual characteristics and various higher-level campaign factors. We hypothesize that differences in cognitive capacity, political motivation, the availability of political heuristics, and macrolevel factors that affect the difficulty of the choice confronting citizens, including the nature of the political information environment, should all affect the probability of a correct vote. We find significant support for seven proposed hypotheses across three levels of analysis, which places responsibility for incorrect votes on both the individual and our electoral system. Democracy works best when citizens are interestedin politics, able to place current events in properhistorical context, attentive to the actions of rep-resentatives in government, aware of institutional rules and requirements so that responsibility for government actions can be properly attributed, and engaged in the governing process to the extent they vote for the candi-dates they believe best represent their interests. This is

Managing withdrawal: Afghanistan as the forgotten example in attempting conflict resolution and state reconstruction

Perhaps surprisingly, given the availability of new Russian memoir material, some excellent individual monographs, and a large variety of declassified documents, a full operational-political account of the Soviet Union's withdrawal strategy from Afghanistan has yet to be written. This article, utilising openly published yet neglected sources, attempts to fill that gap. The final fate of the Najibullah regime, and the contradictory effect of the National Reconciliation Policy in Afghanistan itself, suggests four key lessons for international forces today as disengagement from both Iraq and Afghanistan again becomes a pressing issue, and as questions around re-creating stability within a failed state scenario again occupy the international community