Sunday Night Linkage

Apologies for slow blogging; the beginning of the semester and my ongoing efforts to kill the Air Force (book!) take precedence. Some links:

• Derek Reveron on the growing military appreciation for human security concerns. I’d say that in the United States the Navy has taken the lead on this, perhaps because its greatest “victories” in the past few years have been disaster relief operations.
• Chris Blattman and William Reno wonder where all the African revolutionaries have gone. This is to say, why was intra-state conflict in the 1960s and 1970s characterized primarily in ideological terms, while modern intra-state conflict is characterized in ethnic and resource terms?
• Jeb Koogler on how Russia is consolidating its position in South Ossetia. While I’ve been consistently skeptical of claims about how the Georgians are brave little toasters standing on watch on the ramparts of liberty, Russian behavior in the dispute has hardly been characterized by principled altruism.
• Amy Butler discusses NATO’s approach to missile defense. I’ll have more on this later, but to preview I think that the long-running debate about missile defense will become irrelevant in the medium term. Technologies are advancing on multiple fronts that make ballistic missile defense effectively inevitable, rendering the question “should we work on ballistic missile defense” moot.
• Neil Sinhababu discusses the emerging thought on Winston Churchill. I’m not ashamed to say that I have a framed picture of Winston Churchill in my basement, while I would be ashamed to say that I had a picture of Stalin. This doesn’t mean that I fail to recognize Churchill’s crimes, rather that his admirable qualities are worthy of recognition.
• Adam Elkus thinks about Starcraft and Napoleon.  The inability to delegate basic operational and tactical tasks is undoubtedly annoying, although I’d suggest that the narrative aspect of Starcraft and its kin also precludes grand strategic innovation.