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

International Relations

Neorealism Realized in Ukraine: Another Notch in the Post for Realpolitik

Neorealism Realized in Ukraine: Another Notch in the Post for Realpolitik

There will likely never be a grand theory of international politics. However, some models remain more useful than others. None will be able to predict the exact where and when of the next war, let alone the outcome of that conflict. The expectations of neorealism, however, provide a parsimonious model with which to examine events and identify the most important variables which determine the causes, or triggers, of cooperation and conflict. Identification of such triggers can go far in informing foreign policy responses to prevent or mitigate conditions that lead to war.

#Reviewing Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century

#Reviewing Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century

In this welcome addition to the literature on alliances, international relations scholar Alexander Lanoszka makes an optimistic case for the continued salience of the U.S.-led alliance system. In his two-hundred-page study, he reviews the most common areas that past studies have focused on: alliance formation, fears of entrapment and abandonment, burden-sharing, warfare, and alliance termination.

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.

Viewing Russia’s Actions Through the Lens of Imperialism: #Reviewing Leo Blanken’s Rational Empires

Viewing Russia’s Actions Through the Lens of Imperialism: #Reviewing Leo Blanken’s Rational Empires

The literature on international security for the last three decades has primarily focused on the twin problems of terrorism and insurgency as the principal threats to the global status quo, and in doing so has neglected the role of conquest as an instrument within great power competition. The emerging era of bare-knuckled territorial aggrandizement by revisionist great powers, therefore, has largely caught the academy underprepared. Given this, I offer a ten-year anniversary review of a book that could assist in shaping our understanding of the changing nature of the international system today.

The “Strategic Counterinsurgency” Model: Escaping a One-Dimensional Strategic Worldview

The “Strategic Counterinsurgency” Model: Escaping a One-Dimensional Strategic Worldview

When the term “great power competition” (GPC) appeared in the 2017 National Security Strategy, it served as a wakeup call to many in the U.S. defense establishment. It signaled a sudden rhetorical shift which produced two positive developments. First, it prompted the military to embrace innovation with a newfound sense of urgency. Second, it helped to alert the American public to the strategic challenges presented by China’s newly aggressive foreign policy. But although its handy acronym is still alive and well in some sectors of government, “GPC” has fallen into disfavor, and for good reason.

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.

Sharpening the Blunt Tool: Why Deterrence Needs an Update in the Next U.S. National Security Strategy

Sharpening the Blunt Tool: Why Deterrence Needs an Update in the Next U.S. National Security Strategy

Recent thinking on deterrence has evolved beyond these simple logics. Now emerging concepts such as tailored deterrence, cross-domain deterrence, and dissuasion offer new ideas to address criticisms of deterrence in theory and practice. Therefore, the most vital question for the new administration is: how should the U.S. revise its deterrence policy to best prevent aggression in today’s complex environment? A review of the problems and prospects in deterrence thinking reveals that in addition to skillfully tailoring threats and risks across domains, U.S. policymakers should dissuade aggression by offering opportunities for restraint to reduce the risk of escalation.

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.

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.

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.