Excellence in Historical Research and Analysis
Excellence in Historical Research and Analysis
In previous posts, I highlighted a call for more prediction and accountability in the field of security studies, and detailed Trevor N. Dupuy’s forecasts for the 1990-1991 Gulf War. Today, I will look at The Dupuy Institute’s 1995 estimate of…
Is it possible for an outside country to build an effective indigenous military? The United States inter-agency and national security communities have a strong current interest in helping other countries develop and sustain effective security establishments. This is officially termed…
James Jay Carafano, historian and Vice President for Foreign and Defense Policy at the Heritage Foundation, recently issued a call for the U.S. defense community to back off debates over “the latest doctrinal flavor of the month” and return to…
A number of forecasts of potential U.S. casualties in a war to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait appeared in the media in the autumn of 1990. The question of the human costs became a political issue for the administration of…
When I mused over how much new strategic debates are sounding like old Cold War strategic debates, I really had no idea. The U.S. national security debate really is going Back to the Future. Mark Perry has an article in…
My colleague Chris Lawrence has taken me to task with regard to my last post on the topic of morale. I asserted that Trevor Dupuy’s claim that human factors influenced the outcome of combat was controversial. Chris pointed out that…
One of Trevor Dupuy’s more important and controversial contributions to a theory of combat was the assertion that outcomes were dictated in part by behavioral factors, i.e. the human element. Among the influential human factors he identified were leadership, training,…
One of the great historical “what if’s” of recent memory was the imagined clash between the military forces of the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact in West Germany. This scenario – particularly a highly…
[NOTE: This post has been edited to more accurately characterize Trevor Dupuy’s public comments on TNDA’s estimates.] Operation DESERT STORM began on 17 January 1991 with an extended aerial campaign that lasted 38 days. Ground combat operations were initiated on…
In my last post on the subject of prediction in security studies, I mentioned that TDI has a public forecasting track record. The first of these, and possibly the most well know, involves the 1990-1991 Gulf War. On 13 December…