As the recent fighting in Serbia illustrates, the technology of modern warfare is in constant evolution, with implications spanning a wide range of public policy areas from the broad dimensions of alliance strategy to the specific confines of defence investment, production, and trade. For the past several years, technological innovation in the arms industry of the worlds leading states has been proceeding in relation to the phenomenon of globalisation in the civilian sector. Although the combined impact of the postulated revolution in military affairs and the globalisation of industry has been felt in all Western states, it has been of particular concern in two NATO countries Canada and the United Kingdom as each is located on the margins of a continental market in defence goods. Both have established a set of privileged linkages and interests with this market although they have retained a certain strategic, political, and economic distance.
Security, Strategy, and the Global Economics of Defence Production features contributions from a broad range of policy analysts and practitioners in Canada and the United Kingdom whose primary concern is to identify and analyse the major challenges that Ottawa and London will be facing in the coming decade. Among the issues and challenges considered are understanding the changing nature of threat and risk to security interests, devising appropriate means of harnessing and responding to technological change in warfare, and assessing the relative merits of regional defence-industrial groupings as opposed to trans-Atlantic arrangements. The contributors also discuss developments in policy respecting the procurement and export of arms as well as the enhancement of the quality of bilateral defence co-operation and trade. David G. Haglund is director of the Centre for International Relations, Queens University. S. Neil MacFarlane is director for the Centre of International Studies and Lester B. Pearson Professor of International Relations at Oxford University.