Alessandra Nisch
Putin’s Wars: Testing Boyd’s Strategy of ...

President Putin made three foundational assumptions in launching his war against Ukraine that should have been correct but were not. First, Putin assumed the invasion of Ukraine would be a quick and easy fight. Second, he assumed the world would denounce the invasion but tacitly allow it. Third, Putin assumed the war would deter NATO expansion.

Putin’s Wars: Testing Boyd’s Strategy of Applied Friction

Complex Systems

Reconceiving U.S. Economic Strategy

Reconceiving U.S. Economic Strategy

The mental model of a unified government “orchestrating” the economic instrument of power is fundamentally misleading. Rather, the more appropriate “mental model” to describe the milieu of the economic instrument is as a network of a variety of entities, and even more specifically to describe that milieu as a complex adaptive system. Behaviors in such a system are inherently decentering– no single node in the system predominates. Understanding how the economic instrument can operate in this system also requires understanding the rest of the elements and their interconnected interdependencies.

Knowing the Knowable: Two Fallacies of the Military Paradigm

Knowing the Knowable: Two Fallacies of the Military Paradigm

The U.S. military paradigm is rooted in two dangerously outmoded assumptions about 21st-century reality. First is the military’s assumption of proportionality, or that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This leads to a corollary that causal relationships of the future are generally knowable. The second is the assumption of additivity: that the behaviors of a whole are a scaled reflection of that whole’s disaggregated parts. With this assumption, knowing the parts provides full knowledge of the whole, creating the belief that all wholes are knowable through aggregating the knowledge of their parts.

An Evolutionary Approach to Problem Framing and Strategy

An Evolutionary Approach to Problem Framing and Strategy

To maintain national survival a state must develop strategies that avoid cumulative change to the point of extinction or speciation. Essential to this feat, national adaptedness recognizes not only the infinite potential of the state, but the importance of resiliency or fitness within a constant state of change. Past controversy notwithstanding, biological metaphors have served for millennia as effective comparative devices. Modified contextually to fit within international relations, modern biological evolutionary theory and ecology offer an objective theory of change that supports a systemic and holistic grasp of problem framing and strategy.

Feedback Driven Decisions and the Evolution of Intelligence Analysis in the United States

Feedback Driven Decisions and the Evolution of Intelligence Analysis in the United States

The intelligence community’s analytic product dissemination needs to move to a more transactional framework. Accumulated consumer feedback delivered back to the producer would result in more rapid changes from the community, improve the client’s decision-making, and elevate the national security impact of both producers and consumers.

Penetrate Uncertainty: Descriptive Planning in a Complex Tactical Environment

Penetrate Uncertainty: Descriptive Planning in a Complex Tactical Environment

The U.S. Army’s Military Decision Making Process provides a step-by-step model for decision-making and order production. However, it provides insufficient direction for how to adapt when confronted with complexity. Commanders and staffs often scramble to re-plan when faced with adversity, consuming the entire organization in an attempt to get back on the plan or develop a new one.

On Establishing a Technical Union

On Establishing a Technical Union

Art is what allows America to create extraordinary futures out of chaos. And art, once again, will allow America to achieve policy and military success out of science. America embraces and disciplines chaos to create strength and power. For “liberty is power,” John Quincy Adams said. “The nation blessed with the largest portion of liberty must in proportion to its numbers be the most powerful nation upon earth.” An artist who begins with a vision and nurtures and disciplines the power of chaos with a lightness of being and a firmness of mind, will be rewarded with the surprise of creating something that exceeds his or her original vision at the end.