I spent a few days last week in the presence of about 10 academics working in the field of Russian Foreign Policy. As I told them at the end of our meeting, I was struck by three main characteristics of this field: 1) the often astoundingly non-systematic empirical basis of much Russian foreign policy analysis; 2) the stovepiped nature of much of the work; and 3) the lack of any serious attemtp at cumulative knowledge building on this country that is once again become a major policy preoccupation of Western defense and security planners. My main rallying cry was that if we, as a community of experts, want to make a useful contribution to the West's attempt at dealing with a 'new' Russia, we will have to find ways to overcome these three hurdles.

Stephan's Top-10 Book Recommendations for Defence and Security Planning

Paul Davis
Beinhocker
Taleb
Zolli & Healy

European Defence Agency's First-Ever War Game

From June 4-6, the European Defence Agency (EDA) will conduct its first ever war game in The Hague. The game will stress-test EDA's current Capability Development Plan against a stretching set of scenario ensembles. HCSS and TNO are the core team that was contracted by EDA to assist in the preparation and execution of this war game, which we called ECAPAG (European Capability Assessment Game). This table-top exercise will bring together participants from EDA’s participating Member States as well as from EU entities like the European Union Military Committee and the Crisis Management & Planning Directorate. HCSS developed a method to derive a set of scenarios from a large volume of foresight studies in a traceable way that can also be regularly updated. HCSS, in close cooperation with TNO, also formulated a computer-assisted game design that allows to translate these scenario ensembles into capability trends for each of the tasks described in the EDA's Generic Military Task List as well as for possible new tasks that may emerge from the game. 

Attachment security

Thanks to a large EU project on societal security, I have been reading up what we called the unexplored crevasses of  security. One of the big discoveries for me was the rich literature on attachment security
reminded by the Boris Cyrulnik, the impressive French popular writer
link to resilience,
talked on Laurent Ruquier (10/7/2012) about the serenity of a kid experiencing a bombing raid in a basement in the security of his closest family vs the fear of a kid that might be far away from the bombs but also from those securitizing links
also mentions the favellas in Rio:
when police is sent in, the main guys of the gangs have to show they are tough
now they send in soccer players, samba dancers, etc - create links, attachments

C'est  l'exemple  des favelas de Sao  Paulo au  Brésil, où  j'ai travaillé  : les enfants envoyaient  balader les psychologues, mais pas les guitaristes, les danseurs de samba ou  les footballeurs, avec lesquels  un  début de  lien  se  tissait. Avec cette méthode culturelle, le président Lula a  pacifié  50  %  des  favelas,  là  où  la  police avait échoué . Donc il y a du travail culturel à faire, il faut convaincre les hommes politiques que c'est possible.

The rise of the rest

"The decline of the West and the rise of the rest" has become a very popular one-liner amongs the kommentariat.

UK equivalent : ask the average Britton

but also other away of looking at this: the rest is becoming like the West. Which may have enormous implications for armed forces. right now, we are willing to do things in 'the rest' that we would never tolerate in 'the West'. e.g. strike and collateral damage.
we are still willing to use 'force' in the West when we feel that
but we don't fire live ammo - we use rubber bullets, tear gas, water canon

Just a thought on 'effective' defense. Think of us humans as a biological species. In the bigger scheme of things, we must be among the most vulnerable of all species. Not much natural 'force protection' - no armature, etc. Not much 'mobility' - just try outrunning a cheetah. Not very strong when compared to other primates or other much stronger species. Not all that big as you find out when you look in awe at an elephant or a giraffe. No real special weapons like venom, sharp teeth or claws, vicious horns, electric rays or any other types of weapons that nature has invented. And yet, the 'force', the capability bundle we have evolutionarily developed trumps all of these better protected, faster, bigger, intrinsically deadlier species. Might there not be a lesson in that for our defense organizations?
For those interested in this, I recommend this fascinating article in Scientific American.

The sad state of affairs in 'applied' security studies

 I always jealously look at articles in other theoretical disciplines (say in the 'life' sciences) that often synoptically summarize the main hypotheses for phenomena they are struggling with in some box with the authors in the left column, and their findings (which are often contradictory, especially when you're dealing with small-N research) in the other. But how many of those do we have in say international relations theory? The same applies to the more applied side of strategic studies. In many fields that are - or at least should be, if strategy were really about 'big picture' isues -  of interest to us (say economic policies, or social policy or even education, health policy), international organizations produce much empirically-based comparative research. I am, for instance, a great fan and avid reader of the various forms of 'benchmarking' work that the OECD, the World Bank and the IMF do in these various areas. Just trying to 'dissect' various policies that countries follow in those areas, trying to come up with various (input, throughput AND output - and sometimes even outcome) indicators and then seeing if we can somehow map all of those in a search for waht seems to work (under which circumstances, etc.) We have absolutely nothing of the sort in the field of international security. NATO has no mandate to do so (although some of us are trying to change this) and has no real 'in-house think tank anyway - only some embryonic fragments exist throughout the organization, such as in the Policy Planning Staff in the Private Office of the Secretary-General; in the newly created 'Emerging Security Challenges Division' within the and within ACT 

 the EU might (but not in the defense realm, and even if it did, it would not likely have the guts to include non-EU states in the comparisons). And the OSCE or the UN are hardly worth mentioning in this context. [Incidentall, given the current state of international governance I still think that the OECD would be perfect for this job - PRECISELY because it has so little