David Omissi

Bio: David Omissi is an academic researcher from University of Hull. The author has contributed to research in topics: Empire & Power (social and political). The author has an hindex of 11, co-authored 18 publications receiving 612 citations. Previous affiliations of David Omissi include King's College London.

The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860-1940

Abstract: List of Tables List of Abbreviations Acknowledgements Preface Recruiting Strategy Enlisting Strategies Fighting Spirit Dissent Indian Officers and Indianization Military Power and Colonial Rule General Conclusion: The Sepoy and the Raj Biographical Notes Glossary of Indian and Military Terms Notes Bibliography Index

Air power and colonial control

Abstract: Part 1: The origins of air policing - the emergence of independent air power, the frontier and Somaliland 1919-20 Iraq and the survival of the RAF 1920-25 - the air control debate 1920-22, air control in action 1922-25 the extension of air control - Great Britain and Ireland, Palestine, India, South-West Arabia, Africa the limits of air substitution - the air ministry and ground forces, tactical cooperation, substitution and the Navy. Part 2: The geographical environment of air policing - the long arm of the state, time and space, air power in a resistant medium indigenous responses to air policing - expectations, from terror to adaptation, resistance the technical dimension - air strategy, technology, training and doctrine imperial politics and the role of force - limited and unlimited uses of force, criticisms of air policing, air policing and disarmament comparisons - air power in Morrocco and Syria, the Italian Empire in Africa.

Guardians of empire : the armed forces of the colonial powers c. 1700-1964

Abstract: Guardians of empire, David Killingray imperial vice - sex, drink and the health of British troops in North Indian cantonments, 1800-58, Douglas Peers the recruitment of Indonesian soldiers for the Dutch Colonial Army, c.1700-1950, Japp de Moor too-zealous guardians? the Royal Navy and the South Pacific labour trade, Jane Samson military power in German colonial policy - the "schutztruppen" and their leaders in East and South-West Africa, 1888-1918, Kirsten Zirkel Cerebrus' dilemma - the US Army and internal security in the Pacific, 1902-40, Brian Linn "watch and ward" - the Army in India and the North-West frontier, 1920-39, Tim Moreman all "askaris" are family men - sex, domesticity and discipline in the King's African Rifles, 1902-64, Timothy Parsons the demobilized African soldier and the blow to white prestige, Frank Furedi order before reform - the spread of French military operations in Algeria, 1954-58, Martin Thomas gender issues and African colonial armies, David Killingray.

Approved for Public Release; Distribution is Unlimited

Abstract: PROTRACED COUNTERINSURGENCY: CHINESE COIN STRATEGY IN XINJIANG by MAJ J. Scott LaRonde, USA, 95 pages. In 1949, following the conclusion of its revolutionary war against the Chinese Nationalist forces, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) peacefully occupied China’s western most province of Xinjiang. For nearly sixty years, the PLA has conducted a counterinsurgency against several, mostly Uyghur-led, separatist movements. Despite periods of significant violence, particularly in the early 1950s and again in the 1990s, the separatist forces have not gained momentum and remained at a level one insurgency. Mao ZeDeng is revered as a master insurgent and the father of Fourth Generation Warfare. Strategists in armies worldwide study his writings on revolutionary and guerilla warfare. This monograph concludes that Mao, as well as the communist leaders who followed him, was also successful at waging protracted counterinsurgency. For nearly sixty years, separatist movements in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan have all failed. This monograph analyzes the conflict in Xinjiang and concludes that the Chinese continue to defeat the separatist movement in Xinjiang through a strategy that counters Mao’s seven fundamentals of revolutionary warfare.

Coup-proofing: Its Practice and Consequences in the Middle East

Abstract: In the aftermath of the U.S.-led coalition’s defeat of Iraq in the Gulf War, many observers believed that Saddam Hussein would eventually be toppled in a military coup. After years of dashed hopes, however, few expect that the Iraqi military is likely to undertake such action. Many analysts claim that the Iraqi regime is, in fact, coup-proof. Saddam Hussein’s staying power should cause any similarly led U.S. coalition to rethink not just the possibilities of both coups and coupprooang but how it would aght and defeat a coup-proof regime. In this article, I analyze how states become coup-proof, focusing speciacally on the policies that Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Syria have adopted to achieve this goal. These policies include reliance on groups with special loyalties to the regime and the creation of parallel military organizations and multiple internal security agencies. The United States has a particular interest in how these countries have made their regimes coup-proof. Saudi Arabia is an important U.S. ally, Iraq is a hostile state, and Syria is somewhere in between. Conoict between the United States and either Iraq or Syria, however, pits a superpower with a short attention span against regimes that have accepted serious constraints on their ability to exercise their full military potential. Both states have developed heavily politicized militaries that are incapable of realizing this potential as long as their leaderships continue to divert resources to protect their regimes. At the same time, they have created a militarized politics that is surprisingly resilient in the face of defeat. If a U.S-led coalition decides that it wants to overthrow a coup-proofed regime through military action, it will have to devote serious attention to the regime’s true underpinnings. Field commanders will need more extensive means of understanding their opponent’s political-military situation and greater insight into the coalition’s political intentions. Moreover, the coordination of political-military operations will require greater political involvement

From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War

Abstract: The proponents of late modern war like to argue that it has become surgical, sensitive and scrupulous, and remotely operated Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or 'drones' have become diagnostic instruments in contemporary debates over the conjunction of virtual and 'virtuous' war. Advocates for the use of Predators and Reapers in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism campaigns have emphasized their crucial role in providing intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance, in strengthening the legal armature of targeting, and in conducting precision-strikes. Critics claim that their use reduces late modern war to a video game in which killing becomes casual. Most discussion has focused on the covert campaign waged by CIA-operated drones in Pakistan, but it is also vitally important to interrogate the role of United States Air Force-operated drones in Afghanistan. In doing so, it becomes possible to see that the problem there may not be remoteness and detachment but, rather, the sense of proximity to ground troops inculcated by the video feeds from the aerial platforms.

Diaspora, Development, and Democracy: The Domestic Impact of International Migration from India

Abstract: List of Figures and Tables ix Acknowledgments xiii Chapter 1: The Missing Leg of the Globalization Triad: International Migration 1 Chapter 2: Analytical Framework and Research Methodology 23 Chapter 3: Selection Characteristics of Emigration from India 50 Chapter 4: Economic Effects 84 Chapter 5: Social Remittances: Migration and the Flow of Ideas 124 Chapter 6: International Migration and the Paradox of India's Democracy 162 Chapter 7: The Indian Diaspora and Indian Foreign Policy: Soft Power or Soft Underbelly? 185 Chapter 8: Civil or Uncivil Transnational Society? The Janus Face of Long-Distance Nationalism 210 Chapter 9: Spatially Unbound Nations 253 Appendix I: Survey of Emigration from India (SEI) 273 Appendix II: Survey of Asian Indians in the United States (SAIUS): Methodology 281 Appendix III: Survey of Asian Indians in the United States (SAIUS): Questionnaire 287 Appendix IV: Database on India's Elites (1950-2000) 293 Bibliography 297 Index 315

Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied

Abstract: If we think there is a fast solution to changing the governance of Iraq, warned U.S. Marine General Anthony Zinni in the months before the United States and Britain invaded Iraq, \"then we don't understand history.\" Never has the old line about those who fail to understand the past being condemned to repeat it seemed more urgently relevant than in Iraq today, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the Iraqi people, the Middle East region, and the world. Examining the construction of the modern state of Iraq under the auspices of the British empire—the first attempt by a Western power to remake Mesopotamia in its own image—renowned Iraq expert Toby Dodge uncovers a series of shocking parallels between the policies of a declining British empire and those of the current American administration. Between 1920 and 1932, Britain endeavored unsuccessfully to create a modern democratic state from three former provinces of the Ottoman Empire, which it had conquered and occupied during the First World War. Caught between the conflicting imperatives of controlling a region of great strategic importance (Iraq straddled the land and air route between British India and the Mediterranean) and reconstituting international order through the liberal ideal of modern state sovereignty under the League of Nations Mandate system, British administrators undertook an extremely difficult task. To compound matters, they did so without the benefit of detailed information about the people and society they sought to remake. Blinded by potent cultural stereotypes and subject to mounting pressures from home, these administrators found themselves increasingly dependent on a mediating class of shaikhs to whom they transferred considerable power and on whom they relied for the maintenance of order. When order broke down, as it routinely did, the British turned to the airplane. (This was Winston Churchill’s lasting contribution to the British enterprise in Iraq: the concerted use of air power—of what would in a later context be called \"shock and awe\"—to terrorize and subdue dissident factions of the Iraqi people.) Ultimately, Dodge shows, the state the British created held all the seeds of a violent, corrupt, and relentlessly oppressive future for the Iraqi people, one that has continued to unfold. Like the British empire eight decades before, the United States and Britain have taken upon themselves today the grand task of transforming Iraq and, by extension, the political landscape of the Middle East. Dodge contends that this effort can succeed only with a combination of experienced local knowledge, significant deployment of financial and human resources, and resolute staying power. Already, he suggests, ominous signs point to a repetition of the sequence of events that led to the long nightmare of Saddam Hussein’s murderous tyranny.