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

Gray Zone

Lost Tradition: #Reviewing Strategiya

Lost Tradition: #Reviewing Strategiya

A shroud of myth and legend surrounds Russian strategy. As far back as the 1980s, the U.S. began looking at the widespread use of precision-guided munitions and other associated technology because the Russians had an allegedly more advanced conception of their potential. In 1982, the operational level of war debuted in U.S. doctrine, allegedly because it existed in Soviet doctrine. The only way to combat such misconceptions is to take the Russians at their word. Specifically, by reading their words. Strategiya: The Foundations of the Russian Art of Strategy, edited by Dr. Ofer Fridman, Lecturer at King’s College London, is one of the best weapons available.

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.

The White Elephant in the Room: Antarctica in Modern Geopolitics

The White Elephant in the Room: Antarctica in Modern Geopolitics

Antarctica’s isolation may have set the stage for a hard pivot in global interest. Discarding these holdover assumptions will be important to recalibrate our understanding of the region’s strategic relevance. Without reform to the Antarctic Treaty system, and great powers assuming collective responsibility, Antarctica could even become a potential catalyst for outright conflict.

Clausewitz, the Trinity, and the Utility of Hybrid War

Clausewitz, the Trinity, and the Utility of Hybrid War

The pillars of the trinity provide a foundation to understand how hybrid warfare employs irregular, unconventional, and conventional military power to balance against the risk of war trending towards absolute violence and open conflict. Consequently, hybrid warfare is an operational concept where military and non-military capabilities are optimised to distort reason, shape passion, and leverage chance to achieve strategic objectives and reduce the risk of escalation.

#Reviewing The Russian Understanding of War

#Reviewing The Russian Understanding of War

Jonssan’s thesis is that the Russian government and armed forces believe there has been a change in the nature of war with the advent of the information revolution. Specifically, information warfare is now so potent that it can achieve political goals commensurate with war without recourse to military means. The resulting book offers an efficient overview of trends in Russian military thought since the collapse of the Soviet Union paired with detailed examinations of the two major subjects that have defined those trends: information warfare and color revolutions.

Hybrid Threats and the Constabularization of Strategy

Hybrid Threats and the Constabularization of Strategy

The primary project is not defeating combatants—instead, the project is the community itself. What better way to ensure the community remains central to strategies of securing them than to find mechanisms to directly adopt precepts of community policing when countering hybrid threats—to constabularize America’s approach to security.

Bolshevik Hybrid Warfare: #Reviewing Russia in Flames

Bolshevik Hybrid Warfare: #Reviewing Russia in Flames

Engelstein’s book serves as a useful reminder that the hybrid warfare playbook is not new, especially not within the context of Eastern Europe. Almost every tactic Western analysts have attributed to Russia since the 2014 invasion of Crimea can be found in the book. Invading and calling a snap referendum to validate it is how the Poles took Vilnius from Lithuania. When an election in the Ukrainian Rada resulted in unfavorable political leadership, the Ukrainian Bolsheviks decamped to Eastern Ukraine (Kharkov) to create their own competing institutions, primarily to justify Soviet intervention. Propaganda using the latest technologies of the day, provocations, assassinations (at home and abroad), front-organizations, a nexus between organized crime and state power, and the political use of diasporas were all used extensively by the belligerents of the Russian Civil War. Many of the hot-spots are even the same: Crimea, Donetsk, Kharkov, Abkhazia, Adjara, Transnistria, and others.

Q-Boats and Chaos: Hybrid War on the High Seas

Q-Boats and Chaos: Hybrid War on the High Seas

Maritime hybrid warfare has the potential to become a major issue across all the levels of warfare. Its methods are numerous, but will likely involve autonomous systems, drones, Q-boats, little blue sailors, cyber-attacks, and propaganda. Ultimately, these methods will be hard to combat, but their effects can be reduced.

Vicksburg: The Past and Future of Amphibious Operations

Vicksburg: The Past and Future of Amphibious Operations

The Vicksburg Campaign yields a number of lessons for tacticians and strategists. Grant was a talented commander to be sure, but the most important reason for his success was the Union Navy under the able leadership of Admiral Porter. Not just its presence, but the tight coordination between the two allowed one to support the other and vice versa. Land and sea are too intimately connected during amphibious campaigns for the typical supported/supporting relationships to work, there must be symbiosis.

Applying Jomini to the Ukrainian Donbas Conflict

Applying Jomini to the Ukrainian Donbas Conflict

Looking at the current situation on the ground for the Ukrainian military, Henri Jomini and his work The Art of War provides not only a framework for analyzing the conflict at the campaign level, but also for providing a guide to the Ukrainian military in its effort to defeat the two separatist republics. Jomini’s core principles include offensive, rather than defensive, action, as well as massing forces at a decisive point of attack to gain local superiority. His magnum opus elaborates on these principles and their application, often applying geometric concepts and terms to battlefields and theaters of war for explanations.