Nicolas Johnston has a master’s degree from the Australian Defence Force Academy (UNSW Canberra). He received his BA in Political Science and International Comparative Studies from Duke University, North Carolina. … Nicolas Johnston …

Major Marshall Lawrence is an infantry officer and has twice served as a mentor working with the Afghan National Army. He holds a Master of Business from the University of New South Wales and a Master of Science in the Art and Science of Warfare from the National Defence University, Islamabad. He is a recent graduate of Pakistan Command and Staff College, Quetta, and speaks Pashto and Urdu with varying degrees of success. He is currently posted to Army Headquarters. … Marshall …

Captain Nicholas Allen is a RAEME Officer in the Australian Army who has served in the 1st Combat Service Support Battalion, in the Warrant Officer and Senior Non-Commissioned Officer Academy, and in Headquarters Joint Operations Command as Staff Officer Grade 3—Operational Contracting. He has worked closely with DGLAND, JLC and CASG at the tactical level while platoon commander / operations lieutenant on Force Support Unit 7 in Kandahar, Afghanistan, as well as while working in the operational level at …

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians and Fake News   Written by: Clint Watts Harper, 2018,  ISBN 9780062795984, 304pp Reviewed by Major Lee Hayward Messing With the Enemy is a contemporaneous look at our hyper-connected world, the way that the rise in social media has enabled state and non-state actors to influence individuals, and how these actors potentially can affect Defence, government, business and individuals. Clint Watts points out that state …

The Official History of Australian Peacekeeping, Humanitarian and Post-Cold War Operations Volume 1: The Long Search for Peace, Observer Missions and Beyond, 1947–2006   Written by: Peter Londey, Rhys Crawley and David Horner, Cambridge University Press, 2019, ISBN 9781108482981, 899pp Reviewed by Jason Thomas Despite being entitled ‘Volume 1’, this is one of the final volumes of the Australian War Memorial’s peacekeeping series to be released. With a title that matches its length (900 pages), it is a …

Making Warriors in a Global Era: An Ethnographic Study of the Norwegian Naval Special Operations Commando   Written by: Tone Danielson Lexington Books, 2018,  ISBN 9781498561815, 178pp Reviewed by Dr Kieran Stewart I am not even sure what our culture is today. So many things have changed. It might help us to have an outsider’s view and analyses. You know how things are normally done in the military; they [strategic level] send a hired consultant who will tell us ‘use this model, and then you will have …

  The Strategic Corporal Revisited: Challenges Facing Combatants in 21st Century Warfare Eds: David W Lovell and Deane-Peter Baker UCT Press, 2017, ISBN 9781775822202, 210pp Reviewed by Diana Clark Gill Edited books command a reader’s attention differently from single-author volumes. The former are beehives of perspectives, while the latter enjoy the force of a single mind. For this book, though, I endorse the editors’ choice of the group approach due to the complexity of the subject. The book’s …

The Australian Army operates as a total force, integrating personnel from a range of service categories (SERCATs) in order to generate the capabilities required to win the land battle. The re-introduction of the rank of 2nd Lieutenant for General Service Officers (GSO) whose ab initio training is the Part-Time Officer Commissioning Course (PTOCC), will enable superior alignment of foundation workforce capabilities across the total force, and create a cogent framework for the conditions-based development of …

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.  - Sun Tzu, The Art of War Gray zone conflict must be understood in fundamentally different ways from major warfare. - Michael Mazarr, Mastering the Gray Zone The international system, like any dynamic system, is always in a state of flux. Forces of change, whether we are conscious of it or not, are continuously shaping the environment inside and outside nations. Nations respond to these changes in different ways. One significant area of …

Abstract The first version of the Australian Defence Force Gap Year—Army (ADFGY-A) program, which ran between 2007 and 2012, aimed to develop a pool of willing applicants who would extend their commitment to the Army. 1 Although it has often been cited as a success, when the quantitative outcomes are reviewed more closely the extent of its success becomes somewhat ambiguous and largely dependent on views on the ADFGY-A program’s purpose. Despite the possibility that some intangible and immeasurable …