Office Hours: By appointment
Phone Number: (631) 632-7755 Fax: (631) 632-8203
Email:ian.roxborough@stonybrook.edu
Education: Ph.D., University of Wisconsin at Madison, 1977.
Areas of Interest: War and the Military; Revolutions; and Organizational Sociology.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
My current research looks at military planning and preparations
for future wars. How do military organizations attempt to prepare for future
conflict? I am interested in planning that assumes a 10-20 year time horizon.
The questions I am interested in are: why are some military organizations
better at preparing for the future than others? Under what conditions is
a military organization likely to innovate effectively? What constraints
operate on military organizations to make effective future planning difficult?
I am attempting to grapple with these sorts of questions in two ways.
Firstly, I am examining the debates with the U.S. defense establishment
since the end of the Cold War about the likely nature of future war. I
think of this in terms of two questions: who will be the adversaries? How
will military operations be conducted? This research involves a description
of the debates, an analysis of their rhetoric, and an attempt to map positions
in these debates onto organizational location. My data are drawn from a
variety of official documents and interviews with participants. I have
been actively involved in this project for the last three years. A more
formal statement of this research project is contained in the following
document.
Secondly, I am beginning to work on a cross-national comparison of military visioning of the future. This is still at an early stage. I anticipate using secondary literature to look at military innovation in the period before the First World War and the period between the First and Second World Wars.
