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

Defense Industrial Base

#Reviewing The Military and the Market

#Reviewing The Military and the Market

Looking beyond more traditionally studied factors such as battlefield tactics, leadership, and military strategy, new studies under the general War and Society umbrella take into account social dynamics such as race, class, and gender in the context of national defense and warfare. In the case of The Military and the Market, the wide scholarly aperture offered by the War and Society approach extends to marketplace and economic factors, adding additional layers of complexity to American military history.

Weapons Acquisition and Strategic Uncertainty: Investigating the French Case

Weapons Acquisition and Strategic Uncertainty: Investigating the French Case

Even if universal in human activities, uncertainty is often absent from weapons procurement studies. Despite pioneering works of Scherer and Peck that recognize uncertainty as a main characteristic of weapons acquisitions, academic works that follow often do not investigate this feature in depth. Indeed, weapons procurement studies generally do not consider uncertainty as a crucial factor in explaining why weapon programs fail completely or encounter costs overrun, delays, and deficiencies in delivered capabilities. Explanations range very often from technologically overly ambitious military service’s technological over-ambitions to the deficient procurement strategies of their respective bureaucracy’s deficient procurement strategy. In this paper, we will go further in explaining why some programs fail to produce new weapon systems with in terms of costs, delays and capabilities. As the majority of academic works about weapons acquisition consider the U.S. case, we will bring some change by focusing on the French military establishment.

Defense Industrial Base: A Personal Theory of Power and A Path to Achieving Political Objectives Independently

Defense Industrial Base: A Personal Theory of Power and A Path to Achieving Political Objectives Independently

Defense industrial base issues are almost always discussed in a contextual vacuum — as if their history begins with World War II factories or with President Eisenhower’s 1961 warning of a growing industrial complex. But manufacturing materiel is as ancient as war itself.