As the NATO combat mission in Afghanistan draws to an end, the ‘West’ is starting to take a hard look back at two decades of global stabilization efforts. The ‘lessons learned’ literature on these efforts is exploding. One of the dominant themes in this literature is the need to embed the specifically military toolkit into a much more comprehensive, integrated approach towards planning and executing. In this forward-looking report, HCSS goes a step further by focusing not on the operational but on the strategic level of decision-making. Today, this strategic layer is driven much more by domestic and international ‘politicking’ than by creative strategic thinking. This report advocates a new approach to strategic decision-making which we label ‘strategic design’. It summarizes and borrows some key insights from the ‘design thinking’ literature in the business and public management literature and applies those to the security challenges surrounding stabilization efforts. The report then illustrates this approach by developing and evaluating a few ‘design sketches’ for new capability elements that even a small force provider like The Netherlands could start developing. The report might be of interest to strategic planners and decision-makers on both the military and civilians side

This report contains the results from a research project aimed at identifying new capabilities for the future RNLA. Rather than sketch a full future force profile, it concentrates on promising new, or to be renewed capabilities.

Analyses of the international security environment typically provide somber overviews of the various drivers and manifestations of conflict and instability around the world. Recent developments such as the terrorist attacks in Paris, Beirut and elsewhere, a Middle East in flames, a resurgent Russia, incessant violence in West Africa or turmoil in South China Sea only reinforce this view. By framing our analysis of the security environment in these terms, debates about how to anticipate and respond to these current and future threats invariably focus on those forces of instability and conflict: how to identify threats and enemies and then eliminate them. This report is based on the premise that this conflict-centric mindset has led to portfolio choices in terms of strategies (‘what do we do and how do we do it?’), capabilities (‘what do we do it with?’), and partners (‘who do we do it with?’) that have been excessively onesided. This report argues that there is an alternative, complementary way of framing security that is equally real and equally actionable for defense and security organizations (DSOs4 ): a resilience-centric one.

The twenty-first century has witnessed a pervasive militarization of aesthetics with Western military institutions co-opting the creative worldmaking of art and merging it with the destructive forces of warfare. In Martial Aesthetics, Anders Engberg-Pedersen examines the origins of this unlikely merger, showing that today's creative warfare is merely the extension of a historical development that began long ago. Indeed, the emergence of martial aesthetics harkens back to a series of inventions, ideas, and debates in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Already then, military thinkers and inventors adopted ideas from the field of aesthetics about the nature, purpose, and force of art and retooled them into innovative military technologies and a new theory that conceptualized war not merely as a practical art, but as an aesthetic art form. This book shows how military discourses and early war media such as star charts, horoscopes, and the Prussian wargame were entangled with ideas of creativity, genius, and possible worlds in philosophy and aesthetic theory (by thinkers such as Leibniz, Baumgarten, Kant, and Schiller) in order to trace the emergence of martial aesthetics. Adopting an approach that is simultaneously historical and theoretical, Engberg-Pedersen presents a new frame for understanding war in the twenty-first century.

James Dunnigan’s memorable phrase serves as the first part of a title for this book, where it seeks to be applicable not just to analog wargames, but also to board games exploring non-expressly military history, that is, to political, diplomatic, social, economic, or other forms of history. Don’t board games about history, made predominantly out of (layered) paper, permit a kind of time travel powered by our imagination? Paper Time Machines: Critical Game Design and Historical Board Games is for those who consider this a largely rhetorical question; primarily for designers of historical board games, directed in its more practice-focused sections (Parts Two, Three, and Four) toward those just commencing their journeys through time and space and engaged in learning how to deconstruct and to construct paper time machines. More experienced designers may find something here for them, too, perhaps to refresh themselves or as an aid to instruction to mentees in whatever capacity. But it is also intended for practitioners of all levels of experience to find value in the surrounding historical contexts and theoretical debates pertinent to the creation of and the thinking around the making of historical board games (Parts One and Five). In addition, it is intended that the book might redirect some of the attention of the field of game studies, so preoccupied with digital games, toward this hitherto generally much neglected area of research. Key Features: Guides new designers through the process of historical board game design Encapsulates the observations and insights of numerous notable designers Deeply researched chapters on the history and current trajectory of the hobby Chapters on selected critical perspectives on the hobby

National security starts with strategic anticipation: what are the risks for the Dutch national security? How can the Netherlands prepare for this, and what choices and investments are needed in order to do so?