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

Evolution

#Reviewing Why War?

#Reviewing Why War?

It is no small task to write a book that begins with the evolutionary history of humans and ends with artificial intelligence and the “Skynet” problem, but Coker has a long track record of wide-ranging analyses of war and warfare. Despite being retired from a professorship of International Relations at the London School of Economics (LSE) and Political Science, he continues to direct the LSE’s foreign policy think tank and is a regular participant or consultant in UK and NATO military education and strategic planning circles. Crucial to this book, he has published a number of other works, many of them full length treatments of subjects that are revisited more briefly in this impressive synthesis.

An Evolutionary Approach to Problem Framing and Strategy

An Evolutionary Approach to Problem Framing and Strategy

To maintain national survival a state must develop strategies that avoid cumulative change to the point of extinction or speciation. Essential to this feat, national adaptedness recognizes not only the infinite potential of the state, but the importance of resiliency or fitness within a constant state of change. Past controversy notwithstanding, biological metaphors have served for millennia as effective comparative devices. Modified contextually to fit within international relations, modern biological evolutionary theory and ecology offer an objective theory of change that supports a systemic and holistic grasp of problem framing and strategy.