Browse

The inspections we put up with at airport gates and the endless warnings we get at train stations, on buses, and all the rest are the way we encounter the vast apparatus of U.S. security. Like the wars fought in its name, these measures are supposed to make us safer in a post-9/11 world. But do they? This book explains how these regimes of command-and-control not only annoy and intimidate but are counterproductive. The book takes the reader through the sites, the gizmos, and the politics to urge greater trust in basic citizen capacities—along with smarter design of public spaces. The book criticizes a range of security structures and protocols: airport security that requires body searches while generating long lines of queuing people; New Orleans water projects that precipitated the Hurricane Katrina flood, and the militarized disaster response that further endangered residents; even gender-segregated public restrooms. The book recommends simple improvements, from better structural design and signage to assist evacuations to customer-service procedures that help employees to spot trouble. More so, it argues for a shift away from command and control toward a security philosophy that empowers ordinary people to handle crises. The result is a far-reaching re-examination of the culture of public fear.

To mobilize America's intellectual resources to meet the security challenges of the post-9/11 world, US Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates observed that “we must again embrace eggheads and ideas.” But the gap between national security policymakers and international relations scholars has become a chasm. This book traces the history of the relationship between the Beltway and the Ivory Tower from World War I to the present day. Recounting key Golden Age academic strategists such as Thomas Schelling and Walt Rostow, the book shows that social science research became most oriented toward practical problem-solving during times of war and that scholars returned to less relevant work during peacetime. Social science disciplines like political science rewarded work that was methodologically sophisticated over scholarship that engaged with the messy realities of national security policy, and academic culture increasingly turned away from the job of solving real-world problems. In the name of scientific objectivity, academics today frequently engage only in basic research that they hope will somehow trickle down to policymakers. Drawing on the lessons of this history as well as a unique survey of current and former national security policymakers, the book offers concrete recommendations for scholars who want to shape government work. The result is a rich intellectual history and an essential wake-up call to a field that has lost its way.

We know that a revolution’s success largely depends on the army’s response to it. But can we predict the military’s reaction to an uprising? This book argues that it is possible to make a highly educated guess—and in some cases even a confident prediction—about the generals’ response to a domestic revolt if we know enough about the army, the state it is supposed to serve, the society in which it exists, and the external environment that affects its actions. Through concise case studies of modern uprisings in Iran, China, Eastern Europe, Burma, and the Arab world, the book looks at the reasons for and the logic behind the variety of choices soldiers ultimately make. The book offers tools—in the form of questions to be asked and answered—that enable analysts to provide the most informed assessment possible regarding an army’s likely response to a revolution and, ultimately, the probable fate of the revolution itself. It examines such factors as the military’s internal cohesion, the regime’s treatment of its armed forces, and the size, composition, and nature of the demonstrations. This book explains how generals decide to support or suppress domestic uprisings.

How do terrorist groups control their members? Do the tools that groups use to monitor their operatives and enforce discipline create security vulnerabilities that governments can exploit? This is the first book to systematically examine the great variation in how terrorist groups are structured. Employing a broad range of agency theory, historical case studies, and terrorists' own internal documents, the book discusses the core managerial challenges that terrorists face and illustrates how their political goals interact with the operational environment to push them to organize in particular ways. The book provides a historically informed explanation for why some groups have little hierarchy, while others resemble miniature firms, complete with line charts and written disciplinary codes. Looking at groups in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, the book highlights how consistent and widespread the terrorist's dilemma—balancing the desire to maintain control with the need for secrecy—has been since the 1880s. Through an analysis of more than a hundred terrorist autobiographies, the book shows how prevalent bureaucracy has been, and the book utilizes a cache of internal documents from al-Qa'ida in Iraq to outline why this deadly group used so much paperwork to handle its people. Tracing the strategic interaction between terrorist leaders and their operatives, the book closes with a series of comparative case studies, indicating that the differences in how groups in the same conflict approach their dilemmas are consistent with an agency theory perspective. This book demonstrates the management constraints inherent to terrorist groups and sheds light on specific organizational details that can be exploited to more efficiently combat terrorist activity.