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

Nuclear

Paradox and Prose: Lessons in Nuclear Strategy

Paradox and Prose: Lessons in Nuclear Strategy

When faced with a paradox, our immediate instinct is to try to resolve it. But as Orwell makes clear through the concept of doublethink, attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable achieve only the corrosion of language and thought. Contradictions should be seen not as flaws but as fundamental features of nuclear strategy. Does this consign nuclear strategists—and, by extension, the societies they serve—to perpetual discomfort? Likely it does. But discomfort at the thought of nuclear use can hardly be considered a bad thing.

Strategic Echoes: Operation Unthinkable, Nuclear Weapons, and Ukraine

Strategic Echoes: Operation Unthinkable, Nuclear Weapons, and Ukraine

Those who advocate the continued arming of Ukraine should consider making the dual-track argument and approach this strategic conundrum by equaling the Russian pledge, signaling American willingness to deploy nuclear forces to Europe—just as in the Euromissile Crisis—should Putin go ahead with the mooted nuclear force deployment in Belorussia.

National Styles, Strategic Empathy, and Cold War Nuclear Strategy

National Styles, Strategic Empathy, and Cold War Nuclear Strategy

Strategic assessments reveal a given nation’s understanding of the security landscape and its relative power position. However, strategic appraisals can also betray the fundamental values and prevailing attitudes of the country generating the assessment. American estimators have shown a propensity to frame questions in a manner reflecting their internal predispositions—a tendency that has often contributed to flawed images of external threats. This was the case during the early Cold War when American analysts routinely transferred judgment to Soviet decision-makers. By projecting their own proclivities onto an adversary whose preferences did not align with the United States, analysts persistently misdiagnosed the threat and concealed opportunities to exploit Soviet vulnerabilities. It was not until American strategic analysis underwent a dramatic transformation in the 1970s that more reliable assessments began to emerge. The Cold War, then, offers a stark warning about the pitfalls of an ethnocentric view of the security landscape. Adversaries, after all, are bounded by distinctive national styles that diverge from American logic.

Return from the Grave: The Domestic Nuclear Attack Threat

Return from the Grave: The Domestic Nuclear Attack Threat

American concern for a domestic nuclear attack atrophied after this policy change. The Cold War had ended without a nuclear crisis; so, too, had the age of terrorism. As the world advanced into the Digital Age, a full-scale nuclear war seemed completely incomprehensible, much less a more conventional conflict between nuclear-armed superpowers.

Fear, Honour, and AUKUS in the Indo-Pacific

Fear, Honour, and AUKUS in the Indo-Pacific

To date, Australia has enjoyed the benefit of a hedging strategy that embraces the economic prosperity of a close trading relationship with China while maintaining a close security alliance with the U.S. This strategy has been tested recently and the tension between values and interests requires focused attention. If there was previously any doubt on where that pendulum would swing, it is now firmly answered in the announcement of AUKUS, an Australian, U.K. and U.S. security partnership.

#Reviewing The Bomb

#Reviewing The Bomb

Kaplan does a wonderful job of historically tracing many of the interactions and viewpoints of presidents and key military officers, but he does not make a serious attempt to theorize how certain sets of interactions, personalities, and/or experiences will conditionally affect nuclear deterrence. Still, The Bomb is both timely and classic, a joy to read, and rich in information for students of military history, American political bargaining, and nuclear strategy.

What U.S. Policy for North Korea Fails to Understand

What U.S. Policy for North Korea Fails to Understand

The chance of conflict in the Korean peninsula should be weighed against the direct threat being posed to the U.S. The risk of nuclear war in Seoul should not be exchanged for the risk of nuclear war in San Francisco. Washington should not deceive itself that risk and tragedy can be forever postponed. The U.S. should prepare for the unthinkable to prevent it from becoming the inevitable.

Israel's Nuclear Ambiguity: Would a Shift to Selective Nuclear Disclosure Enhance Strategic Deterrence?

Israel's Nuclear Ambiguity: Would a Shift to Selective Nuclear Disclosure Enhance Strategic Deterrence?

All things considered, Israel must now prepare to rely upon a multi-faceted doctrine of nuclear deterrence. In turn, this doctrine must be rendered selectively less ambiguous and more expressly synergistic. Its operational range of application must include both rational and non-rational adversaries and both state and sub-state foes.

Nuclear Constraints and Concepts of Future Warfare

Nuclear Constraints and Concepts of Future Warfare

Since the United States’ near-peer adversaries possess nuclear weapons, the U.S. Army needs to prepare for small, politically constrained, ambiguous, limited conflict. Without a reorientation on the future, the U.S. Army doctrine and concepts are not useful and potentially limit policymakers’ options, or worse, risk accidental nuclear escalation.

Israel’s Nuclear Strategy: Enhancing Deterrence in the New Cold War (Part II)

Israel’s Nuclear Strategy: Enhancing Deterrence in the New Cold War (Part II)

For Israel, ultimate survival tasks will necessarily be profoundly intellectual or analytic, and require utterly durable victories of "mind over mind" as well as more traditional ones of mind over matter.[1] These victories, in turn, will depend upon prior capacities to fully understand the prospectively many-sided elements of Cold War II. In principle, at least, such prior capacities could lead Israel to seriously consider certain preemption options.

Israel’s Nuclear Strategy: Enhancing Deterrence in the New Cold War (Part I)

Israel’s Nuclear Strategy: Enhancing Deterrence in the New Cold War (Part I)

By definition, as long as particular countries regard their nuclear status as an asset, every state that is a member of the so-called nuclear club is a direct beneficiary of the Cold War. This is because all core elements of any national nuclear strategy, whether actual or still-contemplated, were originally conceptualized, shaped, and even codified within the earlier bipolar struggles of post World War II international relations. Nonetheless, as the world now enters into a more-or-less resurrected form of this initial struggle the strategic postures of each extant nuclear weapons state are being modified within the still-developing parameters of Cold War II.

The New Testament of Strategic Innovation: Three Paths to the Promised Land

The New Testament of Strategic Innovation: Three Paths to the Promised Land

Technology and military organizations exist in a paradoxical relationship. The relentless march of science creates pressure on strategists and their organizations to adopt novel technology and adapt their doctrine. This pressure can derive from technological innovation by one’s own scientists as well as the fear of what a potential enemy is developing on its side. Yet, as political scientist Stephen Rosen points out, organizations, and especially military organizations, have difficulty changing because “they are designed not to change.” A bureaucracy is organized to perform established tasks with uniformity and regularity. This inherent attribute presents the strategic innovator with a dilemma; a military organization must innovate to survive, but it resists innovation by its very nature. This problem is exacerbated by the reality that the direction and timing of optimal innovation is often ambiguous in the moment and only clear in hindsight.

The End of Strategic Patience

The End of Strategic Patience

The Obama Administration’s approach to the problem of North Korea has been termed strategic patience, and is in fact the same approach employed by previous administrations. At the heart of strategic patience is a belief that the status quo, while less than ideal, is better than many possible consequences of taking action. The premise of this argument is incorrect. What we see in North Korea is not a status quo, similar today to what it was decades ago, but rather a situation worsening at an exponential pace.

The Origins of Non-Proliferation (Grand) Strategy in the United States and Great Britain

The Origins of Non-Proliferation (Grand) Strategy in the United States and Great Britain

All strategies have origins; none are conceived wholly from scratch. This axiom holds true even for states’ most fundamental strategies; indeed, the grander and more foundational the strategy, the more deeply rooted its historical and cultural origins. Yet it can sometimes appear otherwise: new strategic realities can emerge, if not overnight, then in the space of, say, a fortnight, a month, or a year, and states can be left scrambling to articulate a coherent response. The advent of nuclear weaponry was one such instance. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki stand as a watershed to which historians and policy-makers are inexorably drawn. What came before stands as pre-history; what follows is a brave new world, demanding brave new strategic visions. So runs the logic.

The Threatening Space Between Napoleon and Nukes: Clausewitz vs. Schelling

The Threatening Space Between Napoleon and Nukes: Clausewitz vs. Schelling

Great theories stand the test of time—shedding light on their subject’s essence despite varying contexts, technological upheavals or mutable human relations. One such work is Carl von Clausewitz’s On War. That said, with the detonation of the atomic bomb and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, many find Clausewitz wanting. How can there be a decisive battle without nuclear annihilation? Nuclear weapons seem to breach our understanding of force, suggesting the need for radically different conceptions of war. Enter Thomas C. Schelling and his work on The Strategy of Conflict

LtGen Sir Graeme Lamb (Ret) and the Iranian Nuclear Agreement

LtGen Sir Graeme Lamb (Ret) and the Iranian Nuclear Agreement

Following the announcement of the Iranian Nuclear Agreement Lieutenant General (Retired, U.K. Army) Sir Graeme Lamb was interviewed by Jason Criss Howk, a former colleague that had assisted him during the creation and international acceptance of the Afghan Reconciliation and Peace Program. The interview was conducted via email from 15–16 July 2015.