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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
132446
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2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article assesses the recent attempts to reform the Russian military and the future prospects of successful reform. Despite serious social and economic ailments, Russia should still be able to modernize its military; however the key obstacles to reform lie in its leadership's inability to shape existing resources into military capabilities. First, the article examines the decay in Russia's manpower, defense budgeting, and defense industrial base. Second, the article surveys the security environment in which Russia must tailor these strategic resources. However, the state of these resources and Russia's security needs do not justify the capabilities that the Russian military has developed. Therefore, the article identifies Russia's inability to transform resources into capabilities as the missing link in military reform. Specifically, these poor 'conversion capabilities' include dysfunctional civil-military relations, misguided threat assessment and strategy formulation, and opaque doctrine. Finally, the article concludes that absent any external existential threats or a military disaster, successful military reform is unlikely, with implications for both the threshold at which Russia decides nuclear weapons are necessary as well as its perceived need for strategic depth.
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| 2 |
ID:
123035
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2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
There is no question that the First Libyan Campaign of 1940-41 was a military disaster for Italy. However, for all of the ethnic slurs and cultural stereotyping levelled at Italian military performance in North Africa by historians and popular authors alike, relatively little research effort invested into identifying the real military disadvantages under which Mussolini's soldiers in this theatre fought. When understood as a product of measurable and objective military factors, like the issue of leadership for example, the rout of the 10th Army takes on an entirely new complexion. The subsequent reputation of Italian soldiers as embarrassing battlefield liabilities in the Western Desert in this period is exposed as unfair. This overlooks the handicaps they fought under, and often ignores the bravery displayed in spite of them all. Like the Australians, the Italians in the Western Desert were ordinary men, no more and no less. In truth, it is singularly unsurprising that so many were killed or surrendered without putting up much real resistance. They faced challenges and conditions that would have handicapped troops from any country.
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