Longevity of the Military Hard Core: The Case of the Turkish Republic

The officer’s record consists of two hyphenated numbers, the first of which is the graduation-and-commission date. The second number reflects the academic standing: The more successful the graduate as far as his cumulative course average is concerned; the smaller is the second number.
In this research, the vast majority of the data involve graduates of the war colleges. It is namely those educative institutions which provide the officer corps to the armed forces. The army college is the equivalent of America’s west point. Gendarme officers come from the same source. The naval war college is the US air force academy located at Colorado springs. In Turkey the army is the biggest force and sometimes merely the word army comes to denote the entire armed forces.

Dominating the War Marketplace: A Case for Expanded Strategic Education in the US Army Acquisition Officer Corps

This article argues for expanding the Army Acquisition Corps’ traditional Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) focus of graduate education programs for its junior field grade and senior company grade officers to include National Security, and Strategic Studies programs.

Implementing this change will increase the acquisition corps’ intellectual capital to manage the evolving assumptions about future wars and adversaries inherent in the Army’s 30 year modernization strategy. Currently Army acquisition branch limits the scope of graduate programs for Army Acquisition Officers to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) graduate programs. While the latter programs are vital to the mission of the acquisition corps, expanding the educational scope to include Strategic and National Security graduate programs will grow a segment of junior acquisition officers that make cost, schedule and performance decisions with a more intimate understanding of increasingly complex strategic security environment.

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Nuclear Facilities and Nuclear Weapons as a Guarantee of Peace

The global peace is as old as the nuclear weapons (NW)-71 years. It would be an overstatement to describe the Cold War as a long peace since a number of local wars were fought but not between superpowers and not using NW. The difference between nuclear and conventional weapons is well known: figuratively speaking, the use of the formers would spoil the winners’ triumph due to the extensive radioactive contamination. 

This is the probable reason why some bellicose leaders have advocated nuclear disarmament. Deterrence by credible threat of retaliation is another peace-preserving mechanism enhanced by NW. Presence of NW has obviously contributed to responsibility of political and military decisions. The same is true for nuclear facilities such as the nuclear power plants (NPP): destruction of a NPP would cause a contamination by radionuclides accumulated in the reactor. Note that contamination after the Chernobyl accident resulted from destruction of only one reactor.

Evolution of Decision Making Processes in Command during Irregular Warfare Operations

Stability operations and irregular war are increasingly complex and continually changing constructs which are no longer served by the traditional processes of the western military forces. This essay examines the significant work that has been carried out in recent years in an effort to develop new problem framing constructs that hope to offer the commander processes for utilizing and manipulating complex adaptive systems. 

What is becoming apparent is that the process of developing frameworks will not be of value to the military commander unless these frameworks can be embedded in the decision making process at an instinctive and experiential level. For the past 5 years the technical cooperation programme (TTCP) has been operating with the objective of harnessing complexity within the defense arena. The introduction of unknown risks associated with the incomplete and shifting information, and continuous readjustments due to the multi cell structure of irregular warfare would create significant base level noise in an adaptive system framework.