In battles, opponents exhibit positive illusions in both believing they can win. With great costs of failure and uncertain success, this represents extreme risk-taking behaviour. Conflict may be expected if one side is cornered, a sacrificial pawn in an overall war strategy, or demanded into action by politicians. However, in many cases even patently weaker forces fight despite nonviolent options. This is "military incompetence", a failure in the assessment of winning probability. Previous explanations (stupidity, psychological deviance and cognitive constraints) have been rejected. Recently, Wrangham [Evol. Hum. Behav. 20 (1999) 3.] proposed that such risk-taking could be adaptive through one of two effects: (1) Performance Enhancement through exaggerated resolve or (2) Opponent Deception by bluffing. Although adaptive if they confer a tendency to win, both processes promote risk-taking behaviour and are therefore potentially responsible for military incompetence. These hypotheses can be distinguished because the Performance Enhancement hypothesis predicts positive illusions in any type of conflict. In contrast, the Opponent Deception hypothesis predicts them in battles but not in surprise attacks, where lack of communication disables any bluff. We conducted a test of these hypotheses using data collected by the US Historical Evaluation Research Organisation, mainly from the Arab-Israeli and Second World Wars. The Opponent Deception hypothesis is supported over the Performance Enhancement hypothesis, but other explanations are not ruled out.

The celebration in Prague should have been more raucous. The most successful alliance in world history has extended to corners of Europe unimaginable just a few years ago. The military capacity gained for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization from expansion is minimal but the political returns will be fantastic. More than any other institution, NATO has helped make Europe democratic, peaceful and whole. What is particularly striking about the new members -- Slovenia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia -- is how many of them emerged from Communist rule with no democratic traditions. The pull of NATO, the desire to join this Western club, created real incentives for democratic consolidation.

Western democracies face increasing constraints on the use of their overwhelming military power. The classical logic, legitimacy and effectiveness of employing force to safeguard national interests apply less and less. State and non-state adversaries threaten important and even vital Western values and interests but are seemingly underterred by - or even inspired by - Western military superiority. At the same time, phenomena such as globalisation, the growing transparency of the battlefield and changing Western value systems subject civilian and military leaders to mounting pressure to wield military power selectively and to use increasing discrimination in choosing means as well as ends.

PALO ALTO, CALIF.
A year ago, a group of terrorists from Saudi Arabia and Egypt attacked the United States using box cutters as their weapons and citing extremist versions of Islamic fundamentalism as their cause.

Today, the Bush administration and Congress are focused almost solely on Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction, with almost no reference whatsoever to his ideology.

This narrow focus has only a loose relationship to the grander vision of "securing freedom's triumph" that President Bush has outlined as the mission of American foreign policy in the new millennium.

As currently framed, the debate about Iraq has produced three dangerous distortions. First, the discussion has confused the means-ends relationship between weapons of mass destruction and regime change. Suddenly, both hawkish Republicans and antiwar Democrats now have asserted that the destruction of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is the new paramount objective in the war on terrorism.

For the hawks, regime change is the means to achieving this objective. Those less eager to go to war assert that this same goal can be achieved by other means, such as sending in the weapons inspectors or even by a surgical strike against weapons facilities.

Both sides of this debate are focused on the wrong objective. Regime change – democratic regime change – must be the objective. If over the next years and decades, a democratic regime consolidates in Iraq, then it will not matter to the United States if Iraq has weapons of mass destruction or not.

Does anyone in the United States know how many weapons of mass destruction the British or French have? Does anyone even lose much sleep over the fact that Russia still has thousands of nuclear weapons and launch vehicles capable of reaching the US in a matter of minutes?

Specialists are rightly worried about the safety and security of Russian weapons, but most Americans no longer make plans for what to do in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack. It was not a robust nonproliferation regime, coercive weapons inspections, or a preemptive war against the Soviet Union that produced this shift in our attitudes about Russia's weapons of mass destruction. Rather, it was regime change in the Soviet Union and then Russia.

Someday, the same will be true in Iraq. Israel already destroyed Iraq's nuclear weapons program once in 1981, delaying but not eliminating the threat. The real objective of any strategy toward Iraq, therefore, must be the creation of a democratic, market-oriented, pro-Western regime.

The singular focus on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction – not unlike the misplaced focus on arms control during the cold war – prevents the US from pursuing a grander strategy that could secure the more important objective of democratic regime change. Moreover, many of the means for achieving this objective are nonmilitary by nature, an aspect forgotten in the discussion.

A second distorting consequence of the current debate is that we have become obsessed with one leader, one country, and one category of weapons, none of which were involved directly in the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Iraqi dictatorship (and not simply President Hussein) is certainly part of the problem, but Iraq cannot be the only front of the war on terrorism. In fact, victories on other fronts could create momentum for the Iraqi regime's demise. Ronald Reagan's strategy for defeating communism did not begin with a military invasion of the Soviet Union, but rather aimed first to roll back communism in peripheral places like Poland, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua. Imagine how isolated Hussein would be if democratic regimes took hold in Iran, Palestine, and Afghanistan.

A third distortion of the debate is the near silence about the kind of regime the Bush administration plans to help build in Iraq after the war. The Bush administration is busy making the case against Hussein, but has devoted much less attention to outlining the plan for a new regime in Iraq. Will it be one state or three, a federal or unitary state, governed by the US or the United Nations? How many decades will occupation last?

We need to have the same "frenzied" debate about Iraq's reconstruction that is now being devoted to Iraq's deconstruction. A serious discussion of the postwar regime in Iraq will help inspire support in Congress, the international community, and within Iraq. Now is the time to be concrete about future blueprints.

To be credible, the message of change must also be directed at other dictators in the region. The probabilities of fanatics coming to power in Pakistan and using weapons against American allies are greater than the probabilities of Hussein doing the same.

Without reform, revolution in Saudi Arabia is just as likely as an Iranian attack on American allies. Failure to define a grand strategy of transformation in the region will condemn American soldiers to fighting new dictators like Hussein over and over again.

China is India's largest and most important neighbor, and despite recent efforts at improving relations between the two countries, the over half-century-old border dispute remains unresolved. While the prospects of a Sino-Indian border war are remote, it is essential that India understand the security implications of the rapidly modernizing Chinese military. It is in this context that this paper attempts to assess the airpower balance and the growing strength of the People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF). The paper argues that even if the pace of its modernization remains slow, the PLAAF will have decisively surpassed regional air forces in strength and capabilities by the end of the current decade.

Air Commodore Ramesh V. Phadke is an active duty officer of the Indian Air Force, currently working as Senior Fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies & Analyses, New Delhi, India. He has held five command positions and many important staff appointments. He is a postgraduate in Defence Studies and has been working on airpower issues. His current interests include China's military modernization and India's national security.

He was a CISAC visiting fellow in 2001 as part of the project "Strategic Stability: China and South Asia."

This encyclopedic book edited by Pavel Podvig provides comprehensive data about Soviet and Russian strategic weapons, payloads, and delivery systems and on the nuclear complex that supports them. The data are drawn from open, primarily Russian sources. Information is presented chronologically, arranged by individual systems and facilities, and is not available elsewhere in a single volume.

Following an overview of the history of Soviet strategic forces, the book discusses the structure of the political and military leadership in the Soviet Union and Russia, the structure of the Russian military and military industry, nuclear planning procedures, and the structure of the command and control system. It describes the nuclear warhead production complex and the Soviet nuclear weapon development program. It then focuses on the individual services that constitute the so-called strategic triad--land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, the strategic submarine fleet, and strategic aviation. It presents an overview of Soviet strategic defense, including air defense systems, the Moscow missile defense system, the radar and space-based early warning networks, and the space surveillance system. The book also includes a description of the Soviet nuclear testing program, including information on test sites and on all Soviet nuclear tests and peaceful nuclear explosions. It concludes with a look at the future of strategic nuclear weapons in Russia.