Defence and Strategic Studies Questions and Answers

Answer: D

The discipline that is not akin to it is astronomy.

Defence and strategic studies is an interdisciplinary field of the social sciences. It draws on history for military history and the study of past wars, on political science and international relations for theories of power, the state and security, and on sociology for the study of armed forces, society and conflict, along with economics, geography and psychology.

Astronomy is a natural science concerned with celestial bodies and the universe. Space technology matters to modern defence, but the science of astronomy is not one of the disciplines the subject is built from.

Answer: D

The keyed code is Both (A) and (R) are true.

The assertion is the standard distinction: a state is a political and geopolitical entity, defined by territory, population, government and sovereignty, while a nation is a cultural or ethnic community. The reason is also true: states seek legitimacy by identifying themselves with a particular cultural group or nation, which is the idea behind the nation-state.

Since both statements hold, the codes declaring either of them false are wrong. The codes here do not ask whether (R) explains (A), only whether each is true.

Answer: B

The correct matching is (a)-(iv), (b)-(i), (c)-(ii), (d)-(iii), the code (iv) (i) (ii) (iii).

Hans Morgenthau wrote Politics Among Nations (1948), the founding text of classical realism. E. H. Carr wrote on the inter-war years in The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939 and International Relations Between the Two World Wars. Edward Said wrote Orientalism (1978), and Francis Fukuyama The End of History and the Last Man (1992).

The other codes misplace Morgenthau, giving him Orientalism, Fukuyama's book or Carr's in turn.

Answer: C

The distinction was drawn by Herbert Spencer.

In his Principles of Sociology, Spencer contrasted militant societies, organised for war, with centralised authority, compulsory cooperation and subordination of the individual to the state, with industrial societies, organised for production and trade, with voluntary cooperation, decentralisation and individual freedom. He expected social evolution to move from the first type to the second.

Durkheim distinguished mechanical and organic solidarity, Marx modes of production, and Saint-Simon wrote of an industrial society run by producers.

Answer: B

Defence and strategic studies is largely a study of the use of military power for political objectives.

The discipline grows out of Clausewitz's insight that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Strategy, in Liddell Hart's and later definitions, is the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfil the ends of policy, and strategic studies examines how states threaten or use force to achieve political goals.

The evolution of warfare and military policy in the information age are parts of the field, not its defining concern, and the use of soft and hard power for socio-economic objectives describes development or foreign policy more broadly.

Answer: C

It was Hans J. Morgenthau.

In Politics Among Nations, discussing the evaluation of national power, Morgenthau warns against 'the fallacy of the single factor', the error of making one element of power absolute. He gives geopolitics, which elevates geography into the determinant of national destiny, as an example, along with nationalism and militarism.

Kissinger, Colin Gray and Robert Jervis are later strategic thinkers; Gray in particular defended geopolitics rather than dismissing it as a fallacy.

Answer: A

The keyed answer is Manning.

I could not trace this exact wording to a published source under any of the four names, so the attribution rests on the official key. What can be said is what the line means: it defines security negatively, as the absence of insecurity, rather than as a stock of weapons or power.

The other three names are known for different statements. Robert McNamara argued in The Essence of Security (1968) that security is development, not military hardware. Barry Buzan, in People, States and Fear, called security an essentially contested concept and framed it as the pursuit of freedom from threat. Kenneth Waltz's neorealism makes survival under anarchy the first aim of a state. None of them is the usual source of the quoted sentence, which is why the keyed name stands, but readers should treat the attribution as the examiner's, not as one confirmed against the original text.

Answer: D

Neo-realism was first outlined by Kenneth Waltz.

Waltz's Theory of International Politics (1979) explained state behaviour by the anarchic structure of the international system and the distribution of capabilities among its units, hence 'structural realism'.

E. H. Carr, Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau are classical realists, who traced power politics to human nature and the nature of politics rather than to the structure of the system.

Answer: B

National interest is best defined as the general and continuing objectives for which a nation acts.

The national interest refers to the enduring goals of a state as a whole, above all its survival, security and well-being, which guide its foreign policy regardless of which government is in power. This is the sense in which realists like Morgenthau use the term.

The interest of particular groups, democratic parties or ruling parties is partisan or sectional, not national. A government may present its own party's interests as national, but the concept refers to the nation's continuing objectives.

Answer: B

The keyed answer is Robert Jervis.

I could not confirm that this sentence appears in Jervis's writing, so the attribution rests on the official key. The idea it states, that international conflict is often tragic rather than the work of wicked actors, fits his best-known contribution, the security dilemma: when states seek only their own security, the steps they take can make others feel insecure and provoke the very conflict they feared, without anyone intending harm.

The tragic view of politics has older roots in classical realism, for example in Herbert Butterfield's argument that wars come from mutual misunderstanding between states that incline to peace, which is why a reader may be tempted by a different name. Of the options given, Buzan is known for the contested concept of security, Raymond Aron for his sociology of war and peace between sovereign states, and Stephen Walt for the balance of threat, none of which is a statement about tragedy.