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Everyday security threats
Everyday security threats explores public perceptions of security threats in contemporary Britain, using data from extensive fieldwork and drawing on perspectives from International Relations, security studies and political psychology.
eBook
Creating the national security state
For the last sixty years, American foreign and defense policymaking has been dominated by a network of institutions created by one piece of legislation--the 1947 National Security Act. This is the definitive study of the intense political and bureaucratic struggles that surrounded the passage and initial implementation of the law. Focusing on the critical years from 1937 to 1960, Douglas Stuart shows how disputes over the lessons of Pearl Harbor and World War II informed the debates that culminated in the legislation, and how the new national security agencies were subsequently transformed by battles over missions, budgets, and influence during the early cold war.
Stuart provides an in-depth account of the fight over Truman's plan for unification of the armed services, demonstrating how this dispute colored debates about institutional reform. He traces the rise of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the transformation of the CIA, and the institutionalization of the National Security Council. He also illustrates how the development of this network of national security institutions resulted in the progressive marginalization of the State Department.
Stuart concludes with some insights that will be of value to anyone interested in the current debate over institutional reform.
eBook
The End of Victory
The End of Victory recounts
the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most
secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net
Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC). From 1953 onward, US
leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen
if they failed in a nuclear war-how many Americans would die and
how much of the country would remain. The NESC told Presidents
Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of
the worst failure of American strategy-a maximum-effort surprise
Soviet nuclear assault on the United States.
Edward Kaplan details how NESC studies provided key information
for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with the USSR
and on the size and shape of the US military. The subcommittee
delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in
Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During
these critical moments and day-to-day containment of the USSR, the
NESC's reports offered the best estimates of the butcher's bill of
conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives.
Taken with the intelligence community's assessment of the
probability of a surprise attack, the NESC's work framed the risks
of US strategy in the chilliest years of the Cold War. The End
of Victory reveals how all policy decisions run risks-and ones
involving military force run grave ones-though they can rarely be
known with precision.
eBook
Comparative grand strategy : a framework and cases
This book develops a new approach in explaining how a nation's Grand Strategy is constituted, how to assess its merits, and how grand strategies may be comparatively evaluated within a broader framework. The volume responds to three key problems common to both academia and policymaking. First, the literature on the concept of grand strategy generally focuses on the United States, offering no framework for comparative analysis. Indeed, many proponents of US grand strategy suggest that the concept can only be applied, at most, to a very few great powers such as China and Russia. Second, characteristically it remains prescriptive rather than explanatory, ignoring the central conundrum of why differing countries respond in contrasting ways to similar pressures. Third, it often understates the significance of domestic politics and policymaking in the formulation of grand strategies - emphasizing mainly systemic pressures. This book addresses these problems. It seeks to analyze and explain grand strategies through the intersection of domestic and international politics in ten countries grouped distinctively as great powers (The G5), regional powers (Brazil and India) and pivotal powers hostile to each other who are able to destabilize the global system (Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia). The book thus employs a comparative framework that describes and explains why and how domestic actors and mechanisms, coupled with external pressures, create specific national strategies. Overall, the book aims to fashion a valid, cross-contextual framework for an emerging research program on grand strategic analysis.
Book
Honest broker? : the national security advisor and presidential decision making
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” “Who will be guarding the guardians?”—Juvenal
The U.S. president’s decisions on national security and foreign policy reverberate around the world. The National Security Council (NSC) and the national security advisor are central to the decision making process. But how was the role of the national security advisor originally understood, and how has that understanding changed over time? Above all, how has the changing role of the national security advisor affected executive decisions and the implementation of policy?
Now, presidential scholar John P. Burke systematically and thoroughly addresses these questions. In Honest Broker?, he reviews the office of national security advisor from its inception during the Eisenhower presidency to its latest iteration in the White House of George W. Bush. He explores the ways in which the original conception of the national security advisor—as an “honest broker” who, rather than directly advocate for any certain policy direction, was instead charged with overseeing the fairness, completeness, and accuracy of the policymaking process—has evolved over time. In six case studies he then analyzes the implications of certain pivotal changes in the advisor’s role, providing thoughtful and sometimes critical reflections on how these changes square with the role of “honest broker.”
Finally, Burke offers some prescriptive consideration of how the definition of the national security advisor’s role relates to effective presidential decision making and the crucial issues of American national security. Honest Broker? will be an important resource for scholars, students, political leaders, and general readers interested in the U.S. presidency, foreign policy, and national security
eBook
States, Citizens and the Privatisation of Security
Recent years have seen a growing role for private military contractors in national and international security. To understand the reasons for this, Elke Krahmann examines changing models of the state, the citizen and the soldier in the UK, the US and Germany. She focuses on both the national differences with regard to the outsourcing of military services to private companies and their specific consequences for the democratic control over the legitimate use of armed force. Tracing developments and debates from the late eighteenth century to the present, she explains the transition from the centralized warfare state of the Cold War era to the privatized and fragmented security governance, and the different national attitudes to the privatization of force.
eBook