Paper details
This is a policy report, not an essay; the report should be addressed from one government official, military
officer or policy adviser, representing a named institution, to a policy-maker, either political or military, who
also represents a named policy-making institution.
In my case, it is from the Minister of Defence so we will be answering from that perspective everything else
that is needed is attached
The report should be dated. The writer and recipient of the report may be either imaginary or real people. If
real, they may be alive or now dead
The report should be presented like a policy report: that is to say, your aims in writing it should be to help
the recipient understand an issue in contemporary warfare and to recommend a course of action to deal
with it
Guidelines for writing the policy report
Definition. A policy report is a report designed to assist the policy-making process. Its purpose is to
evaluate policy options on a specific topic for a recipient involved in the policy-making process (for
example, a head of state, a head of government, a Minister for Defence, the Chief of the Defence Staff, the
Chairman of the United States’ Joint Chiefs of Staff, or a parliamentary committee, et al.).
Content. you should (a) summarize a problem, issue, task, challenge, or mission arising in contemporary
warfare or contemporary security, describing the background to it; and (b) put forward a recommendation or
recommendations as to what measures the government or military concerned should take in relation to it.
You may recommend either that an entirely new policy or initiative be adopted, or that the existing policy
should remain the same, or that the existing policy should be altered to some extent. If there are a number
of options, you should make the policy-maker aware of them and weigh them up, considering their
competing advantages and disadvantages. The report should state clearly which option you think best.
Your recommendations should be practical and realistic. Matters you may want to consider in deciding
whether they are practical and realistic are: (i) are the resources available to implement the recommended
course of action? (ii) does the recommended course of action involve political risks? (iii) does the
recommended course of action raise moral issues?
Style. you may use images, maps, graphs, statistical tables or other types of illustration if you think they
would help the policy-maker understand the matter better. You may use other stylistic devices as well (e.g.
bullet points, an executive summary at the head of the report) if you think that this would help the policymaker understand the issue better.
References, bibliography and length in words. In only two respects should the policy report differ from one
you would see in the Ministry of Defence in London or the Pentagon in Washington, DC: it should be fully
referenced and should contain a bibliography. For referencing, you should use either the Chicago or the
Harvard system (remember that Chicago footnotes do not count towards the word length of the report,
whereas Harvard in-text references do count towards it).