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

Book Review

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.

#Reviewing The Peacemaker

#Reviewing The Peacemaker

The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink takes up the banner of attributing the end of the Cold War to the foreign policy acumen and foresight of Ronald Reagan. Indeed, it suggests that Reagan possessed a remarkable perspicacity that allowed him to perceive the world's historic changes on the horizon well before others did, and that this, plus his innate optimism, helped him lead the United States toward a better future.

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 Tsunami of Ships and Aircraft: #Reviewing Victory at Sea

A Tsunami of Ships and Aircraft: #Reviewing Victory at Sea

Almost eighty years after that war’s end, it sometimes seems little remains to be written about the war at sea. Is another history needed? Kennedy’s genius has always been his ability to highlight how the shifting tectonic plates of power underlie and help explain the surface history, sometimes represented in a single event. Rather than uncovering new history, Victory at Sea arranges existing history in ways that better reveal the whole.

#Reviewing The Inheritance

#Reviewing The Inheritance

Mara E. Karlin’s new book, The Inheritance: America’s Military After Two Decades of War is a sobering yet necessary read. In looking at the effects of the post-9/11 wars on the U.S. military, she asks—and proposes answers to—two questions. First, “[h]ow did the most capable military in U.S. history—indeed in the history of the world—fight to, at best, a draw in its longest contemporary conflict?” And second, “why has this not been the subject of greater reflection and debate.”

Learning in Conflict #Reviewing Mars Adapting

Learning in Conflict #Reviewing Mars Adapting

In Mars Adapting, Frank Hoffman studies bottom-up adaptation through the lens of organizational learning theory to explain its dynamics. This theory states that business organizations must continuously evaluate their performance in a competitive and shifting environment to prosper and even survive. Hoffman states that this notion applies to militaries during wartime as they seek to gain an advantage over their adversaries.

#Reviewing Just and Unjust Uses of Limited Force

#Reviewing Just and Unjust Uses of Limited Force

Just and Unjust Uses of Limited Force by Daniel Brunstetter offers an insightful look into the permissions and limits of international force short of war. Brunstetter proposes a theory of justice for limited force (or vim in Latin). The need for such a study is indicated by the fact that most of the terminology used to describe morality in war does not adequately capture contemporary uses of force, which warrants additional vocabulary. This is what Brunstetter provides. Full of contemporary examples and counterfactuals, Brunstetter's work offers a relevant heuristic to aid in understanding the fights of today.

#Reviewing Three Dangerous Men

#Reviewing Three Dangerous Men

Three Dangerous Men is a fast read that is also full of details and insights into the lives of Russian Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov, the late Iranian Quds Force Commander Major General Qassem Soleimani, and Vice Chair Zhang Youxia of China’s Central Military Commission. Jones presents the reader with formative experiences in the life and professional development of the three military leaders and how they each contributed to shaping the 21st century military and foreign policies of their respective countries.

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.

#Reviewing Bitskrieg

#Reviewing Bitskrieg

In Bitskrieg, John Arquilla distills much from his three decades of advocacy about networked warfare into a compact volume accessible to a wide audience. He displays a continuing ability to produce provocative arguments and engaging books. The tenets of Bitskrieg are consistent with many of Arquilla’s previous writings. These include the point that networked warfare or netwar encompasses cyber conflict but extends beyond it.

#Reviewing Blood, Guts, and Grease

#Reviewing Blood, Guts, and Grease

Through historical research, Mikolashek captures the early experiences of the soldier and the lessons he learned during the Great War that influenced his character and leadership twenty years later during his World War II campaigning. In addition to descriptions of Patton’s early battlefield exploits, Mikolashek writes of the birth of tank warfare and the creation of the Army’s Tank Corps. From early success at the U. S. Military Academy at West Point to the transition to the newly formed Tank Corps, Patton made informed and deliberate decisions as a young officer that steered his career to the ground floor of tank warfare.

#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 Korea: The War Before Vietnam

#Reviewing Korea: The War Before Vietnam

In Korea: The War Before Vietnam, Callum A. MacDonald writes with short, sharp clarity. The precision of his writing does not take away from necessary details or the importance of the Korean War in international history, especially for those involved in that conflict. The book is driven by a narrative told through official documents, robust secondary sources, and scholarship developed over nearly 35 years.

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.

#Reviewing a Review of Kaplan and Another Kaplan: To Kill Nations: American Strategy in the Air-Atomic Age and the Rise of Mutually Assured Destruction

#Reviewing a Review of Kaplan and Another Kaplan: To Kill Nations: American Strategy in the Air-Atomic Age and the Rise of Mutually Assured Destruction

There are so many themes, plots, and subplots within this text that it is difficult to distill the work, but the main argument is that the U.S. Air Force incrementally developed an atomic air strategy from 1945 until the strategy fell apart after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kaplan’s narrative relies heavily on this event to sever the interconnected pieces of atomic strategy and air strategy once the popular imagination began to view atomic weapons as unusable.

In a Time of Global Crisis, Lessons from an Unhappy Warrior: #Reviewing a Biography of Alanbrooke

In a Time of Global Crisis, Lessons from an Unhappy Warrior: #Reviewing a Biography of Alanbrooke

Alanbrooke’s six years at the apex of the British military, at a time when the nation faced its greatest crisis of modern history, tells a story of the inherent value of deep professional competence, a willingness to register dissent, and a commitment to an ideal greater than any single organization or individual. Alanbrooke proved the criticality of remaining unruffled by those things outside of his control, yet demanding the very best from those within his domain.

#Reviewing Churchill’s Phoney War

#Reviewing Churchill’s Phoney War

Clews’ book certainly fills a void in the study of Churchill during the Second World War. His analysis does provide a useful study in the difficulty of crafting a strategy that serves multiple constituencies and solves multiple problems. Modern students of strategy should take heart that they are in good company when they seek solutions to no-win scenarios.

Predisposed to be Polarized: #Reviewing Whistleblowers’ Role in National Security

Predisposed to be Polarized: #Reviewing Whistleblowers’ Role in National Security

Whistleblowing has a long and predictably contentious history in America. What distinguishes essential whistleblowing from detrimental leaking? In assessing answers to that question, do the motivations of the individual revealing government secrets matter or should we focus primarily on the benefits and costs of their actions? Driving these tough questions is the considerable tension between the paramount need for secrecy to protect national security interests and the erosion of democratic governance that secrecy can abet.

#Reviewing Innovating in A Secret World: Can America Innovate its Way to Security?

#Reviewing Innovating in A Secret World: Can America Innovate its Way to Security?

Srivastava provides an excellent work on the legal and policy challenges American companies face if they want to innovate in the national security environment, but she does not offer a compelling vision for improving the situation. Anyone who wishes to improve this situation will need a solution and the support of a movement that is good for Congress, good for business, good for the defense and national security customers, and good for innovators. And that is the conundrum of innovating for national security.

#Reviewing Sir Antony Beevor’s The Battle of Arnhem

#Reviewing Sir Antony Beevor’s The Battle of Arnhem

Although much is written about victory in war, relatively little memorializes the lives lost for lost causes. Even after the mission fell to pieces, the men who fought in Arnhem showed remarkable determination, grit, bravery and sacrifice. The Allied defeat at Arnhem was as honorable as any victory, and Sir Beevor pays it a worthy tribute while weaving a human story about defeat and the inhumanity of war.