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The Western way of war has come full circle. After centuries of evolution toward increased totality and brutality, it has turned back once again to the ritualistic and restrained methods of primitive warfare. Largely, this has been due to an interaction between the perceived lack of utility in contemporary warfare, developing humanitarian public opinion, and increasing professionalism among militaries. The significance of these evolutionary trends in the way that the West engages in modern warfare is that they are potentially dangerous, and they include the possibility that the West will be unprepared for a future foe whose defeat requires more unrestrained methods.
The Western way of war has come full circle. After centuries of evolution toward increased totality and brutality, it has turned back once again to the ritualistic and restrained methods of primitive warfare. Largely, this has been due to an interaction between the perceived lack of utility in contemporary warfare, developing humanitarian public opinion, and increasing professionalism among militaries. The significance of these evolutionary trends in the way that the West engages in modern warfare is that they are potentially dangerous, and they include the possibility that the West will be unprepared for a future foe whose defeat requires more unrestrained methods.
This monograph revises, reexamines, and reevaluates the contemporary military environment. It finds that the environment is a period of relative military stasis, of slow technological development, and of little novelty in broader issues. If anything, it is a return to an older period, of the time before the Cold War, before the fear of nuclear war dominated all other thinking in the field. This monograph is a first step in a broader and more incisive revision of contemporary strategic thought.
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Tackling the key topics of reform and modernization, this important new book systematically examines performance in public management systems. The authors present this seminal subject in an informative and accessible manner, tackling some of the most important themes. Performance Management in the Public Sector takes as its point of departure a broad definition of performance to redefine major and basic mechanisms in public administration, both theoretically and in practice. The book: situates performance in some of the current public management debates; discusses the many definitions of ‘performance’ and how it has become one of the contested agendas of public management; examines measurement, incorporation and use of performance information; and explores the challenges and future directions of performance management. A must-read for any student or practitioner of public management, this core text will prove invaluable to anyone wanting to improve their understanding of performance management in the public sector.
This book offers an overview of the ethical problems posed by Information Warfare, and of the different approaches and methods used to solve them, in order to provide the reader with a better grasp of the ethical conundrums posed by this new form of warfare. The volume is divided into three parts, each comprising four chapters. The first part focuses on issues pertaining to the concept of Information Warfare and the clarifications that need to be made in order to address its ethical implications. The second part collects contributions focusing on Just War Theory and its application to the case of Information Warfare. The third part adopts alternative approaches to Just War Theory for analysing the ethical implications of this phenomenon. Finally, an afterword by Neelie Kroes - Vice President of the European Commission and European Digital Agenda Commissioner - concludes the volume. Her contribution describes the interests and commitments of the European Digital Agenda with respect to research for the development and deployment of robots in various circumstances, including warfare.
In recent years, the south-western border of the United States has come under increasing pressure from the activities of Mexican narco-insurgents. These insurgents have developed rapidly from beginnings as nebulous gangs into networked cartels that have exposed the porosity of the border. These cartels declare no allegiance to any nation and are engaging in asymmetrical warfare against sovereign states throughout Mexico and in Central America. Within such states, de facto political control is shifting to the cartels in the ‘areas of impunity’ that have emerged. This book addresses these concerns and focuses on the criminal insurgencies being waged by the gangs and cartels. It is divided ...
The idea that the military environment is con¬stantly evolving, becoming more and more dangerous and technologically sophisticated, is a common one. In the past century, we have seen the emergence of to¬tal war, nuclear weapons, and bloody unconventional and asymmetric campaigns. We have used many of the offshoots of this evolutionary idea to guide our own setting of defense policy, seeing in the evolution a constant escalation, albeit one perhaps marred by occasional yet small oscillations. In an earlier monograph, Slowing Military Change, Dr. Zhivan Alach questioned whether or not we are indeed in an era of rapidly evolving military technol¬ogy. In this monograph, he takes an even longe...
Long before reinventing government came into vogue, the Urban Institute pioneered methods for government and human services agencies to measure the performance of their programs. This comprehensive guidebook synthesizes more than two decades of Harry Hatry's groundbreaking work. It covers every component of the performance measurement process, from identifying the program’s mission, objectives, customers, and trackable outcomes to finding the best indicators for each outcome, the sources of data, and how to collect them. Hatry explains how to select indicator breakouts and benchmarks for comparison to actual values, and describes numerous uses for performance information. Since the publica...
The United States has seen rapid proliferation of youth gangs since 1980. During this period, the number of cities with gang problems increased from an estimated 286 jurisdictions with more than 2,000 gangs and nearly 100,000 gang members in 1980 (Miller, 1992) to about 4,800 jurisdictions with more than 31,000 gangs and approximately 846,000 gang members in 1996(Moore and Terrett, in press). An 11-city survey of eighth graders found that 9 percent were currently gang members, and 17 percent said they had belonged to a gang at some point in their lives (Esbensen and Osgood, 1997).Other studies reported comparable percentages and also showed that gang members were responsible for a large prop...