Böcker av Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen

If the military were a business, would you buy shares? Over recent years, Western armed forces, particularly the US, have been costing more yet achieving less. At the same time, austerity measures are reducing defence budgets. This book uses defence data to examine the workings of modern Western militaries and explore what kind of strategies can overcome this gap between input and output. Instead of focusing on military strategy, Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen seeks to draw on the ideas of business strategy to assess alternative business cases - reforming military HR to combat instability in the 'Global South' or utilising new technologies to overcome the prohibitive costs of current systems. Analysing the philosophical, strategic and budgetary underpinnings of these alternatives, he concludes that a more radical break from current military organisational practices is needed which would allow them to fit within a nation's overall national security system without ever-increasing budgets.

In the globalised world of the twenty-first century, security policy in Western societies is driven by a wish to prevent future threats from becoming reality. Applying theories of 'risk society' to the study of strategy, this book analyses the creation of a new approach to strategy. The author demonstrates that this approach creates new choices for policy-makers and challenges well-established truths within the study of security and strategy. He argues that since the seventeenth century the concept of strategy has served to rationalise new technologies, doctrines and agents. By outlining the history of the concept of strategy in terms of rationality, Rasmussen presents a framework for studying strategy in a time of risk and uses this framework to analyse how new technologies of war, pre-emptive doctrines, globalisation and the rise of the 'terrorist approach to warfare' can formulate a new theory of strategy.

The West, Civil Society and the Construction of Peace describes how the challenges of peacemaking following the First and Second World Wars defined the West. Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen explains how the values of civil society have held the West together and concludes that 'the democratic peace ' is not a 'law' but a recipe for security.