Reviews for Explaining Nato Enlargement

The average rating for Explaining Nato Enlargement based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-12-14 00:00:00 Luis R Ramos I have to admit being rather disappointed by this book. At the outset, I wasn't quite sure whether this was a book about the future of war, or if it was about war in the future. In the end, it was neither. What it did cover was a narrow range of developmental technologies that could be used in warfare and the ethics of their use. As a futurist, I found this uninteresting. The book is overweight on digitised future technologies. Smaller, faster, cheaper, more connected, highly automated. We know the drill. What the book didn't cover were the social technologies of warfare, the use of hybrid interventions, and a whole range of other potential technologies that could be used in the projection of force, such as warfare at the level of DNA. We were given a highly focussed view of future conflict, that, in my opinion, misses a good deal of interesting peripheral vision. That was a shame. The argument then drifted into whether or not we would feel empowered to use these technologies, once we have them. It is my belief that we would because, once things get hot, there is very little restraint over what is and what isn't used. Of course, there would be second and third order consequences. There always are. But it seems that, in the middle of a conflict, the policy choice would be to deal with those as they arise, if they arise. At that point, the killer robots may have run amok, but there you are. I found that vision of the future to be unconvincing. The author seems to take the predictions of technologists too uncritically. We have been close to an AI breakthrough for most of my life, and I'm an old man. We are constantly told that this time will be different, and it never is. So perhaps the author is worrying unnecessarily? I would have liked the book to focus on war in the future. How it would be engaged and by whom it would be engaged. There is a lot of interesting work in this area. The studies of the future of war tend, in my view, to move into technology forecasting too readily, which is why I find them uninteresting. Every new weapons technology in war triggers a new social technology to harness that weapon, and a countervailing social technology to counter it. I am far more interested in the novel social technologies. I admit that's my preference, but it also explains why I found the book to be disappointing. The author generally writes well, but is hard pressed to make interesting a subject in which the reader has little interest. Perhaps more anecdotes could have helped things along? This is really a book for the dedicated aficionado. It wasn't for me.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-04-12 00:00:00 Christopher Grosklos Overall I felt this title gave some interesting views as to the challenges of warfare in the future, with some of Coker's fortes (ethics and war in particular) shining through. However, I felt that the title was perhaps not a prescriptive as others in the field in describing what warfare in the future may look like. In comparison to other titles however, this is not necessarily a bad thing - a number of authors fall into the trap of looking at popular technology, and defining that as how the world will be shaped in the future (e.g. Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century). As a result, they lose their ability to retain currency within a few years of publication as projects change and the global security picture shifts due to political paradigms. Coker's writing style is also a little difficult at times to approach - sometimes it comes up as very academic, others an approachable academic, and sometimes in the popular style of books such as Singer's. As a result, it is approachable for a wide variety of audiences. I was given this book as an advance review copy, but have yet to receive a follow-up to check against.