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

Culture

#Reviewing To Boldly Go: Leadership, Strategy, and Conflict in the 21st Century and Beyond

#Reviewing To Boldly Go: Leadership, Strategy, and Conflict in the 21st Century and Beyond

Drawing on a universe of science fiction franchises including The Expanse, Star Wars, Star Trek, Ender’s Game, Starship Troopers, Dune, Earthseed, The Murderbot Diaries, and many more, a wonderful array of authors, who are strategic thinkers in their own right, offer fresh perspectives in 35 chapters that span 6 major themes: leadership and command; military strategy and decision making; ethics, culture, and diversity; cooperation, competition, and conflict; the human relationship with technology; and toxic leaders.

#Reviewing A Short History of War

#Reviewing A Short History of War

A Short History of War will certainly be welcomed by a larger public interested in military history. Not only has Black remarkably explored multiple facets of the global history of war, but he also highlights complex elements regarding the evolution of warfare over a long period of time. In addition, the volume is written in a language accessible to a general public unfamiliar with the field of war history which helps to democratize debates and discussion about the nature of war.

#Reviewing Cinema and the Cultural Cold War

#Reviewing Cinema and the Cultural Cold War

The book primarily examines how during the first two decades of the Cold War, the Asia Foundation utilized funding from the Central Intelligence Agency to support the work of, and establish connections between, anti-communist filmmakers throughout east Asia…Cinema and the Cultural Cold War is a welcome addition to the growing historiography on how Cold War belligerents actively sought to influence popular culture both domestically and abroad.

#Reviewing The Lone Leopard

#Reviewing The Lone Leopard

In his novel The Lone Leopard, Sharifullah Dorani provides a sweeping view of the struggle that Afghans endured under the burden of foreign influence, ethnic and religious seams, and the clash between traditional conservative cultural norms versus more modern liberal western ideals. The book does an excellent job of bringing the reader into the complicated societal mosaic that makes Afghanistan so unique.

#Reviewing Against All Tides

#Reviewing Against All Tides

The “Kitty Hawk Race Riot'” holds an important place in American naval history. An illustration of the deep and unavoidable connections between the sailors and officers of the Navy and the society they served during the Civil Rights era, it is often mentioned in passing but rarely examined in detail. Marv Truhe’s new book sets out to rectify that oversight and to help readers dive deeply into both the details of the history and the important questions it raises about the Navy of the 1970s as well as the Navy of the 21st century.

National Styles, Strategic Empathy, and Cold War Nuclear Strategy

National Styles, Strategic Empathy, and Cold War Nuclear Strategy

Strategic assessments reveal a given nation’s understanding of the security landscape and its relative power position. However, strategic appraisals can also betray the fundamental values and prevailing attitudes of the country generating the assessment. American estimators have shown a propensity to frame questions in a manner reflecting their internal predispositions—a tendency that has often contributed to flawed images of external threats. This was the case during the early Cold War when American analysts routinely transferred judgment to Soviet decision-makers. By projecting their own proclivities onto an adversary whose preferences did not align with the United States, analysts persistently misdiagnosed the threat and concealed opportunities to exploit Soviet vulnerabilities. It was not until American strategic analysis underwent a dramatic transformation in the 1970s that more reliable assessments began to emerge. The Cold War, then, offers a stark warning about the pitfalls of an ethnocentric view of the security landscape. Adversaries, after all, are bounded by distinctive national styles that diverge from American logic.

David or Goliath? How Thinking Like a Small Nation Can Help Counter China

David or Goliath? How Thinking Like a Small Nation Can Help Counter China

The continued posturing of the United States as the main geopolitical power represents a grave strategic misstep against the rising power of China. This posture overcommits resources to a narrow conception of warfare that then limits the availability of options. If, however, the U.S. were to strategize as a smaller, less wealthy nation, it may develop the strategic flexibility required to counter China.

Improving Foreign Policy Outcomes Requires Investment in Alternative Perspectives

Improving Foreign Policy Outcomes Requires Investment in Alternative Perspectives

Washington cannot afford a focus on unilateral U.S. perspectives, whether to prevent alienating potential partners or to forestall potential adversarial relations. When strategists center policy from a U.S. perspective, they ignore the real cultural risks that accompany those narrative frames. China is just as centered on their own conventional framing, with equally problematic results. Washington must counter Beijing’s growing influence across the instruments of national power without alienating potential allies and partners.

The Mote in Their Eye: Ethnocentrism’s Crippling Impact on Strategy

The Mote in Their Eye: Ethnocentrism’s Crippling Impact on Strategy

The implicit bias of ethnocentrism in the decision-making process warps an otherwise effective process of linking ends, ways, and means to achieve political objectives. Without a deliberate effort to control ethnocentric tendencies in its strategic process, the United States will continue to pursue ineffective strategic courses of action given the dual impacts of ethnocentrism on statecraft: misperceiving ourselves and stereotyping others.

Relational Strategic Culture, Strategy-Making, and China

Relational Strategic Culture, Strategy-Making, and China

The concept of strategic culture gives fresh insights into China’s current strategy and behaviour, particularly in North-East Asia. Strategic culture also demonstrates the difficulty in separating the connection between ideational forces and the development and execution of strategy. This essay expands on the concept of strategic culture by incorporating relationality into the analysis. The argument is that a state’s strategic preferences are shaped normatively over time through consistent inter-state relations. This essay looks at China’s relationships with North Korea and Japan as case studies, before commenting on the implications of relational strategic culture for China’s future actions and the future of strategy.

#Reviewing How the Few Became the Proud

#Reviewing How the Few Became the Proud

Military historians and Marine Corps history buffs will gain much from reading How the Few Became the Proud. Short enough to be finished in several sittings, well-organized to allow for skipping around to focus on one’s individual interests, and useful as a scholarly reference tool for writers and researchers alike, this book will undoubtedly serve the military history community well.

#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.

Institutional Operating Codes: #Reviewing The Culture of Military Organizations

Institutional Operating Codes: #Reviewing The Culture of Military Organizations

Retired U.S. Army General David Petraeus observed that “culture, once formed, is difficult to change; it cannot always be ‘tamed’ but it can and should be understood.” Those responsible for strategic leadership and for preparing their military for the future, must understand how culture impacts the effectiveness of an armed force. This is particularly relevant since most officials today describe the strategic environment as an age of disruptive technological change. Professors Mansoor and Murray offer a superlative foundation for reflecting on how to change the odds of gaining that transformation short of the carnage of a world war.

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.

On Society and the Military Reflections in Recruitment Videos

On Society and the Military Reflections in Recruitment Videos

All kinds of commercials target human weaknesses, and military ads are no exception. Military commercials, however, are a small part of the bigger marketing and public relations strategy that military recruiting tools implement to attract enlistees and create a positive image of service in society. The examples discussed in this article indicate different approaches of how commercials portray the armed forces.

Strategy, War, and Culture: #Reviewing Military Anthropology

Strategy, War, and Culture: #Reviewing Military Anthropology

McFate has not written a guide to control minds and subdue people abroad. On the contrary, she tries to show that military success and the security and prospects of the people on the spot go hand-in-hand. She makes a strong case for accepting different cultures, learning about them, understanding them, and eventually integrating into them in a certain way while living there.

#Reviewing Searching for Boko Haram

#Reviewing Searching for Boko Haram

Frontier zones are the most complex and interesting of regions. They have been explored as wild badlands of smuggling and insurgency in the international system in many recent books from Niall Ferguson, George Friedman, Robert Kaplan, and David Kilcullen. In this vein, Scott MacEachern takes a microscopic view of one relatively small frontier area around the Mandara Mountains on the Cameroon-Nigeria border and describe its inhabitants’ cultural evolution over seven millennia.

Leveraging Regional Expertise to Counter Influence Operations

Leveraging Regional Expertise to Counter Influence Operations

All branches of the armed forces have recognized the need for language and culture awareness training as important for military operations, and each service now has a language and cultural awareness training center designed to teach these critical skills. While these language and cultural initiatives are a step in the right direction, they are simply not aggressive enough to counter the rise of influence operations, or actions designed to produce a desired outcome on a target audience, which are becoming more prevalent as information and technology continue to reach more of the world’s people.