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

Democracy

Competing Against Authoritarianism

Competing Against Authoritarianism

The global rise of authoritarianism is a pressing strategic problem for the United States and its like-minded allies. Chinese and Russian authoritarianism threaten the liberal order from without. Simultaneously, democratic backsliding in the U.S. and Europe undermines liberalism from within. The nature of these twin aspects of authoritarianism requires a joint response able to support and strengthen the liberal order against disintegration. This response must include a more expansive approach to countering the authoritarian warfare occurring below the traditional threshold of armed conflict.

Assessing Chinese Military Capabilities: Response Actions for American Strategy

Assessing Chinese Military Capabilities: Response Actions for American Strategy

American national security depends on a comprehensive understanding of China’s recent defense reforms and weaknesses so that decision-makers remain aware of how willing Xi may be to go to war and how U.S. strategy in Asia should be adjusted to mitigate this potential. The primary concern of the new administration’s National Security Strategy in responding to China’s military modernization should be an equivalent focus on military capabilities, through a reinforced defense budget and collaboration with allies, and secondarily, greater efforts to increase high-level talks with Chinese officials on areas of potential collaboration.

A Game of Great Powers: The Realities of the Evolving Competition between the United States and China

A Game of Great Powers: The Realities of the Evolving Competition between the United States and China

In great power competition, alliances matter as much as anything else. And, as previous great power competitions demonstrate, alliance shifts can lead to instability and even open conflict between competitors. For the United States to maintain the upper hand in a worldwide strategic competition with China, alliances play a central role.

Warning: Scrutinize Any Underlying Assumptions for China in the New National Security Strategy

Warning: Scrutinize Any Underlying Assumptions for China in the New National Security Strategy

Looking back to the Cold War, most analyses, including American intelligence estimates, underappreciated the systemic weakness of the Soviet Union before the precipitous fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Currently, many over-appreciate systemic weaknesses in China linked to demographic decline, debt, and large migrant populations, among other issues, as signs of distress. Today, strategic analyses miss a possible leadership transition in China or gloss over the domestic fissures in American society. Therefore, it is critically important, now more than ever, to question conventional strategic assumptions and logic. Otherwise, the U.S. will be caught by surprise and face utter disappointment with its China policy once again in the not-too-distant future.

“Why Are We in Africa?”: The Dilemmas of Making American Strategy towards the African Continent

“Why Are We in Africa?”: The Dilemmas of Making American Strategy towards the African Continent

President Biden’s Africa team will face three dilemmas that would be recognizable to any American statesman responsible for Africa policy in the post 1945 period. The answers to these three foundational questions, set out in key strategic documents like the National Security Strategy, provide the intellectual framework that foreshadows subsequent resource allocations and shapes the policies through which the United States engages the African continent.

Breaking the Move-Countermove Cycle: Using Net Assessment to Guide Technology

Breaking the Move-Countermove Cycle: Using Net Assessment to Guide Technology

To guide its National Security Strategy’s technology priorities, the Biden Administration should turn to analytic methods that rely less on predictions of future scenarios and capabilities. Instead, they should use the net assessment methodology pioneered by Andrew Marshall and others during the Cold War. Although there is no fixed methodology to conduct a net assessment, in general it evaluates trends in each competitor’s strategy, doctrine, and capabilities a decade or more in the past and future to identify asymmetries.

Expand, Consolidate, Centralize: Organizational Reform in the Next National Security Strategy

Expand, Consolidate, Centralize: Organizational Reform in the Next National Security Strategy

As the United States faces another dramatic shift in the character of its strategic competition with states like Russia and China, it should include in the next National Security Strategy proposals for the expansion, synchronization, and further centralization of U.S. national security organizations’ prerogatives, authorities, and decision-making.

#Reviewing The Craft of Wargaming

#Reviewing The Craft of Wargaming

Despite the increasing popularity of wargaming, academic and professional sources are still scarce. The newest book on wargaming is published by the Naval Institute Press and features a robust description of wargaming as implemented by the United States Naval Postgraduate School . It explains the different purposes of wargaming with the main focus on analytic wargames.

1st Quarter 2021 Journal Call for Papers

1st Quarter 2021 Journal Call for Papers

“Questions are our best friends for the invention and refinement of strong useful theory, and they are the lethal enemies of poor theory.” So suggests Colin Gray. These questions then undergird and shape strategic thinking. What theoretical and empirical question should most inform the rewriting of the U.S. National Security Strategy? This quarter’s series seeks answers to inform the senior leaders responsible for authoring the next U.S. National Security Strategy.

The Department of Defense Needs to Relearn the (Almost) Lost Art of Net Assessment

The Department of Defense Needs to Relearn the (Almost) Lost Art of Net Assessment

Defense officials and analysts have advanced a wide range of solutions to the U.S. military’s operational and budgetary challenges. Most proposals strike familiar notes: invest in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, hypersonics, and unmanned systems; do more experimentation; recruit and manage the force more effectively. These are arguably the table stakes in a great-power competition. To gain and sustain an advantage, the Department of Defense must do more than just get better; it will need to build on U.S. strengths in ways that exploit adversary vulnerabilities and undermine enemy confidence.

Speak Softly and Conceal a Big Stick: A Diplomat’s Strategy for Competing with China

Speak Softly and Conceal a Big Stick: A Diplomat’s Strategy for Competing with China

Although the allure of geopolitics has transfixed much of the Department of State’s political leadership, inter-state competition is a cross-cutting issue rife with bureaucratic and policy complexities that often makes it difficult for agencies, bureaus, or offices not traditionally focused on inter-state competition to bring their regional and thematic expertise to bear. Adding to these challenges is a tendency for public servants unfamiliar with Chinese history and politics to latch onto talking points like malign influence and debt-trap diplomacy as guideposts when creating programs, papers, or policies. While these terms may be powerful narratives for an external audience, U.S. foreign policy practitioners should recognize them for what they are: effective messaging.

A Democratic Disadvantage: Sharp Power and Regime Typology in International Relations

A Democratic Disadvantage: Sharp Power and Regime Typology in International Relations

Within the international system, the importance of structure is not monopolized at the systemic level, but also heavily predicated on how individual states configure and order their nations and the benefits and detriments these structures endow. One of the most important state level structures is regime type. Applied simplistically, examining state structures based on regime type divides the world into a binary construct of democracies and autocracies.

#Reviewing American Power & Liberal Order

#Reviewing American Power & Liberal Order

Overall, American Power is a policy framework that is easy to read and yet full of substance. It bridges the gap between intellectual and practical policy. And while there is nothing necessarily revolutionary about the framework, it hammers home the United States’ role in the world as a promoter of democracy and the liberal order. I am in agreement with Miller that democracy promotion and the liberal order will always be in the United States’ interests.

We Want It, What Is It? Unpacking Civilian Control of the Military

We Want It, What Is It? Unpacking Civilian Control of the Military

The nomination of James Mattis as Secretary of Defense briefly brought the often overlooked concept of civilian control of the military to public attention. Commentators debated whether Mattis’ qualifications, personality, and presumed influence on the administration justified an exception to the law prohibiting recently retired generals from serving in that post. Reassuringly, in that discussion as well as in the larger conversation about the unusual number of retired and acting general officers now serving in traditionally civilian posts, there has been no discernible challenge to the notion of civilian control of the military. Yet underneath this consensus as to the desirability of civilian control, hide differences in understanding about what it actually entails. In short, we want civilian control but do not precisely know what it is.

Democracy: The Key to Avoiding Future Wars? (2)

Democracy: The Key to Avoiding Future Wars? (2)

In the Kantian framework, different kinds of agents pursue democracy at three levels: the individuals within a nation, the states in their relationships with one another and also with their citizens, and humankind. In this post we shall look at how individuals within a nation should behave if they want to truly abide by democratic principles. Should they rebel and when? Should they support war, and which type of war if any?

Democracy: The Key to Avoiding Future Wars? (1)

Democracy: The Key to Avoiding Future Wars? (1)

It is useful—and necessary—to stop, think and reflect on the idea of democracy and its relationship to violence and ultimately war. What is a democracy? What does it mean to behave and act according to its principles? What does it mean for a citizen and what does it mean for a state? Are democracies more peaceful than other regimes? How should democracies act and react in the international world?