Small Wars Journal continues to get a great assortment of submissions from a varied crowd of academics and practitioners of small wars. In the interest of continuing to improve the product we deliver to our readers, I would like to provide our readers and prospective authors with a few observations and a call for papers on an expanded set of topics.
First, we continue to get extremely long, unedited research papers from undergraduate, graduate, and professional military education students. It is important to note that writing for a grade is often quite different from writing for a professional audience. For class assignments, you are often working to get to a specified word count and demonstrate to your professor what you learned about a topic. For publication, you should be working to condense your thoughts to a lower word count. There are a few different goals you should consider when writing an article. 1) Summarizing a wide body of existing literature to give a non-specialist a background in a specific topic. 2) Researching a specific topic to fill a gap in the existing literature (this means you have reviewed the literature and determined that the gap exists). 3) Providing commentary and policy prescription on a current issue, which requires giving just enough background to support your analysis and recommendations. In each of these genres, you should strive to keep your word count as low as is consistent with your goal, shedding extraneous verbiage and interesting but tangential issues to keep your reader engaged in your topic. If you wrote a research paper for a class, please at least go through it again to edit it down. Better yet, write a summary of your own paper, which will both greatly benefit you while also keeping your readers engaged.
Second, as an online journal, we are trying to move away from footnotes and to hyperlinks embedded in the text. For any news articles or any other online resource, simply embed a hyperlink somewhere in the referenced material, whether that is a quote or perhaps a pointer statement like “according to the Small Wars Journal…” For academic journal articles, hyperlink to an abstract of the article at the press that puts it out, JSTOR, or any other online database. Include page numbers parenthetically. For books, link to a page for the book at the press website, Amazon, Google Books, or any other resource. Again, you use parentheses to indicate a page number.
Third, please edit your work, edit your email, and include a brief query statement telling me what your work is about in the email. The quickest way to have your work pushed to the bottom of the queue is to provide me a 20+ page document filled with misspellings or formatting anomalies in the first paragraph.
Finally, most of us are exhausted and exasperated with the same material on Iraq, Afghanistan, and even Vietnam. For that reason, I am including a list of topics that I think would broaden our horizons and help get you past the fatigue on the part of readers in threshing out the same topics over and over.
- I invite our academic and subject matter expert audience to submit a brief summary of the state of the literature in their field, that is what is important for a generalist to know about their field and what are the latest developments in that field. This should be a brief (2500 words or less) summary along with a brief reading list of the most important few papers or books to read in the field.
- We are seeking papers on security and economic developments in Latin America to build our El Centro site.
- More generally, we would like to see more brief essays on socio-economic developments and trends that will underpin change in emerging markets in South and Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. These need not be explicitly focused on war or insurgency, but rather should seek to set a baseline understanding of salient issues in these areas.
- Socio-economic developments in Europe and the U.S. will greatly affect the power balance of the world and the capability of leading states to conduct military operations and diplomacy in the near and mid-term. This is important for professionals in our field to understand and we would like to see papers that tackle these issues.
- As the U.S. begins its “strategic pivot” to Asia, many of us who have been steeped in issues of the Middle East and Afghanistan have a lot of catching up to do. We welcome backgrounders on political, cultural, and socio-economic issues with regard to China and Southeast Asian states.
- In keeping with this thread, we welcome papers on security issues in the South China Sea and the Pacific islands. In keeping with our charter as a Small Wars Journal, please avoid the major order of battle and theater war issues, focusing instead on economic, diplomatic, security cooperation, and ongoing insurgencies or unrest in this area.
- We welcome papers on security and socio-economic issues in eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Turkey.
- Issues of Mediterranean trade and cooperation feed into security issues in North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and southern Europe. These would be of interest.
- Drug and criminal trade flows in the Americas are relatively well known, but updates are welcome for our El Centro section. We would like to see more on other flows, including South America to Africa, Africa to Europe, and Asia to Europe.
- We welcome more historical studies of insurgencies and small wars other than Vietnam. We welcome well written contributions on Vietnam, but please ensure that you have reviewed the literature and are presenting something new.
- Security cooperation and security force assistance is the new vogue in the Department of Defense. These missions face significant statutory challenges, as well as the requirement to meet extremely high expectations for building partner capacity in the face of significant limitations on the part of our partner forces. Papers dealing with these topics are encouraged.
- The U.S. military has and will continue to publish a profusion of studies, concepts, and reports meant to guide our transition to a post-OEF/OIF world and to deal with the coming fiscal constraints. We welcome papers that deal with these fiscal constraints, the validity of concepts and the strategic assumptions that underpin them, and the training and equipping that will be required to deal with these challenges.