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

American Way of War

#Reviewing The Other Face of Battle

#Reviewing The Other Face of Battle

Military history and its practitioners were long derided for their obsession with battle. The bugles and banners style of operational history, the standard approach of the discipline until the mid-1970s, has cast a long shadow of exclusion and dismissal upon military historians and their purpose. That all changed when John Keegan’s The Face of Battle was released in 1976. Wayne Lee, Anthony Carlson, David Preston, and David Silbey come together in The Other Face of Battle to present the next step in Keegan’s cause while highlighting a serious flaw in his objective. This book and its four authors, all of outstanding reputation and pedigree, stand on the 40-year foundation set by the cultural turn. In a masterful homage to Keegan and with eyes to the future, Lee, Carlson, Preston, and Silbey take the iconic work and its framework into the present by asking questions that are as difficult as they are important.

#Reviewing Ways of War: American Military History from the Colonial Era to the Twenty-First Century

#Reviewing Ways of War: American Military History from the Colonial Era to the Twenty-First Century

Overall, Ways of War provides a solid history of the military and warfare in the United States from the colonial era to the present. It is not without its shortcomings, though considering its objectives as a textbook for survey classes, needing to provide enough information for students to become knowledgeable in the field while also not losing them in the details and keeping the amount of material manageable for the time constraints of a course, it accomplishes a lot

#Reviewing Earning the Rockies

#Reviewing Earning the Rockies

It was America’s good fortune—Manifest Destiny if you will—to rise on a temperate continent with abundant resources. Great Britain ceded its empire in part because it could trust and rely on the United States. America does not share this luxury. Pragmatism must be America’s watchword, for neither isolationism nor unilateralism will work.

The American Way of War: And Why it Brings so Much Baggage

The American Way of War: And Why it Brings so Much Baggage

It is said that Germans after World War II stated that they did not like to fight the Americans, as they never stuck to their own doctrine or tactics. Russian doctrine too stated that U.S. forces were unpredictable because all their plans went to hell once a battle had begun. Perhaps that is why one of the great U.S. Army maxims is “No plan survives first contact.” It is true that we tend to bring some “innovations” to war, intentional or not. This could be termed the “tactical” American Way of War. Scholars have spent a lot of time, ink, and breath arguing what the “American Way of War” is, or even if one exists. Russel Weigley has argued that the American Way of War is to bring overwhelming force to bear on the enemy and crush them in absolute and total victory. For myself, hardly daring to even call myself a scholar, I will leave that argument to others with more money and time, but I do have a theory on what I like to call the “American Penchant of War.”