Evolutionary Reality of the Revolution in Military Affairs: Results of a Comparative Study
by Iztok Prezelj, Erik Kopač, Aleš Žiberna, Anja Kolak, Anton Grizold,
Revolution in Military Affairs has been one of the driving concepts for creating modern armed forces capable of coping with the challenges of a contemporary security environment. Revolutionary change in military affairs has been interpreted as discontinuous, radical, non-incremental, and even disruptive change. Evolutionists, however, oppose this view and stress that past military transformations were actually more evolutionary, continuous, incremental, piecemeal, and slow. The third view tried to integrate both views by stressing the patterns of interchange of the periods of evolution and the turbulent periods of revolution. This paper explores the revolution-evolution dilemma quantitatively by setting three logical revolution criteria/thresholds and discovers the number of changes in military affairs on a sample of 33 countries that were actually revolutionary in the period 1992-2010. The paper confirms the argument that Revolution in Military Affairs has been in practice predominantly an incremental evolution in several military dimensions, with rare major (revolutionary) shifts. The statistical results show that only from 2 to 4% of possible revolutionary situations (periods in our measurement) were Revolution in Military Affairs. Only nine countries occasionally reached the revolution threshold of 30% change in one year, 10 countries reached the threshold of 50% change in three years, and only six countries reached the threshold of 70% change in five years. These findings suggest that Revolution in Military Affairs was used more as a promotional slogan, and perhaps even a motivational tool in military affairs.
PolSci Volume 15, number 2 (Winter 2015) comprises articles which deal with themes such as political party funding, recruitment in the civil service and Euroscepticism. The first article deals with the issue of financing political parties in Slovakia. The second explores the revolution-evolution dilemma in military affairs. The third article suggests an association between institutional... »
This text deals with the issues of the financing of the political parties in Slovakia. We are coming out of the assumption that the Slovak system of the political party funding is based on the multi-funding, but the contributions from the government budget will form the most dominant source of the income. This system negatively... »
Revolution in Military Affairs has been one of the driving concepts for creating modern armed forces capable of coping with the challenges of a contemporary security environment. Revolutionary change in military affairs has been interpreted as discontinuous, radical, non-incremental, and even disruptive change. Evolutionists, however, oppose this view and stress that past military transformations were... »
Political institutions have been found to be the source of many policy differences between countries. Elaborating on earlier work in this tradition, this article will suggest an association between institutional veto power creating political constraints, and the discretionary fiscal policy reaction of governments during the economic crisis of 2008. It will be argued that the... »
Political competition is defined as the level of control held by individual political parties as captured by the measures of effective number of parties, number of parliamentary parties, etc. This paper investigates the effect of political competition on the rate of government expenditure growth using competing theories and panel data from 21 OECD countries. In... »
The low interest in the political questions of European integration in Central and Eastern European countries which has sometimes lead to apathy, and in some cases to increasing Euroscepticism among the citizens, can perhaps be partially explained by the lack of expertise and interest among politicians. This paper analyses data on the level of knowledge... »
The aim of this article is to examine the current tendency of recruitment in the civil service in Georgia in the light of the wave of dismissals after the 2012 parliamentary elections and highlight the common problems that are characteristic for competitions in state organizations. Based on data collected during the research, the article claims... »
PolSci (Romanian Journal of Political Science) is a bi-annual journal edited by the Romanian Academic Society (RAS). PolSci is indexed by ISI Thomson under the Social Sciences Citation Index and by other prominent institutions such as IPSA, GESIS, EBSCO, CEEOL and ProQuest. Previous PolSci contributors include Francis Fukuyama, Larry Diamond or Philippe Schmitter, as well... »
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EBSCO
CEEOL
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International Advisory Board
Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (chair) Hertie School of Governance
Larry Diamond Stanford University
Tom Gallagher University of Bradford
Alena Ledeneva University College London
Michael McFaul Stanford University
Dennis Deletant Georgetown University
Helen Wallace London School of Economics and Political Science