In reading Securing Japan I thought Richard Samuels summed it up quite nicely (pp. 109):

There are few truly new ideas about how nations can protect themselves. Each country is armed with its military, its diplomats, its mix of resources, its ambition, and its wits. The rest is, as ever, derivative. This is why students studying international relations, diplomacy, and national security are still required to read The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, and Machiavelli’s The Prince. Ideas about strategy endure because geography, demography, and technology endure as constraints on the ability of leaders to make their people prosperous and safe. But if there are few original ideas about strategy, there are limitless combinations of existing ones. Because the balance among constraints is always in motion, and because the power of neighbors rises and falls, new circumstances always await the application of old ideas. Contexts change, but ideas endure.

QED, see the reading list from my first year of War Studies.

Re: this see this.

Still no teh interwebs yet.

One of the points Buzan et al. make when defining security is that threats are not objective, but are socially constructed. Professor Christopher Coker also touched on this idea in when he spoke on risk thresholds, a talk I have covered previously.

The above graph — which comes from an anti-war site — illustrates the difference between the subjective and the objective quite nicely. The lives taken by terrorism are dwarfed by a number of other problems which aren’t necessarily treated with the same level of urgency. But this graph only makes sense if you consider human life as the measure of security. I would like to see a similar graph measuring economic impact, average insurance rates, or even effects on national power.

Buzan et al. point out that decision-makers gauge threats in aggregate across a number of sectors and not in stovepipes. The above graph may reflect reality in respect to human deaths, but not necessarily the political reality of everyday security.

Over the past week, I’ve been working in conjunction with Michael Tanji of Haft of the Spear on a wiki with the various Security Studies programs for a Masters in the US. It has the dozen resident programs and a half dozen or so long distance programs that are available. The focus is is on security studies, security policy, intelligence and strategy programs as well as programs that offer a Masters in International Relations with a concentration in the aforementioned areas. Should any readers have tips, comments or additional information (including non-US programs), please feel free to leave them in the comments section here or at Haft of the Spear.

Our wiki can be found here.