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

#TheBridgeReadsPoetry

A Year in #Reviewing

A Year in #Reviewing

Michael Howard, the great British historian, once advised that military officer who wish to avoid the pitfalls of military history should study in width, depth, and context—studying the great sweep of military history to see what changes and what does not; studying a single campaign in all its complexity to “get beyond the order created by the historian;” and studying the nature of the societies that fight the wars we seek to understand. Here at The Strategy Bridge, we feel very much the same way about the study of strategy, and we work hard to realize this width, depth, and context in the books we review each week.

A Year in #Reviewing

A Year in #Reviewing

Ralph Waldo Emerson is said to have observed, “I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” As we do each year at The Strategy Bridge, we pause to reflect on our #Reviewing series, the books and movies and other work we’ve consumed as a community—the intellectual meal we’ve shared—and consider what they have helped us to make of ourselves, what they’ve helped us become.

A Year in #Reviewing

A Year in #Reviewing

How do you read? It’s a simple question, but it may not have a simple answer. In a time when we are seeing less of each other, whether because of a pandemic, increased telework as a result of the pandemic, or self-imposed technological isolation, how we read has the potential to vary as much as how we interact with others on a daily basis. Some of us have difficulty ingesting books that are not printed on dead trees while others embrace the freedom of having someone else read books to us while we drive, hike, or run on a treadmill. ‘To read’, like a book itself, holds many different meanings.

A Year in #Reviewing

A Year in #Reviewing

It’s been a year of Zoom, but books endure. Books endure because we read them in isolation, wrote about them in lockdown, and read reviews about them in quarantine. It will take books—with their focus, length, use of evidence, ability to recreate events, and capacity to make sense of those events after the fact—on 2020 and all it entailed to make the light and shadow fall in ways that illuminate what lived experience alone cannot. And for that kind of long-term, sustained engagement with the contexts in which we read this year’s reviews, we’ll continue to need not just books, but writing about those books.

Poetry as Therapy or The Dead Soldiers Society of Poets

Poetry as Therapy or The Dead Soldiers Society of Poets

My first efforts were in high school and they were predictably trite, often to the point of tears. During college years, I was too busy with other, more important affairs to write, yet the times were too intense to ignore the innate power of a good poem; this was the 1960s. I hosted a radio show in college in which, between the music, I would read relevant English and American poetry: Cummings, Whitman, Dickinson, Jeffers, Stevens, Longfellow, and the like. I even created one show around Richard Burton’s readings of Wilfred Owen’s war poetry.

Reading the Poetry of War

Reading the Poetry of War

Poetry is an intensely individual experience—for the poet and for the reader of poetry—and begs for diversity because of it. Soldiers experience war differently from civilians and leaders differently from those they lead. The ancients experienced war differently from our contemporaries. Men experience war differently from women. We experience war differently from them and the living experience it differently from the dead. We propose that you—the readers and writers of war poetry—tell us what we’ve missed. Choose your favorite poem (not book, not poet... but poem) and tweet it or respond on Facebook with an author, a title, and the hashtag #TheBridgeReadsPoetry.