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

Planning

Foresight-Driven Warfare: Bringing Futures Thinking Into The Next Fight

Foresight-Driven Warfare: Bringing Futures Thinking Into The Next Fight

The art of trying to envision the future is not a cure-all; foresight-driven warfare is what we seek. The goal of any nation should be to prepare for various plausible futures or outcomes, which drives down strategic risk, enables a state to become operationally flexible, and positions a state with the means necessary to fight the next fight. Achieving foresight driven national strategy, defense policy, and modernization begins with finding an effective model for planners, which might include Scenario Planning. Scenario Planning methodologies provide prognosticators a way to envision multiple plausible futures versus a singular outcome for a complex, adaptive global system.

Knowing the Knowable: Two Fallacies of the Military Paradigm

Knowing the Knowable: Two Fallacies of the Military Paradigm

The U.S. military paradigm is rooted in two dangerously outmoded assumptions about 21st-century reality. First is the military’s assumption of proportionality, or that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This leads to a corollary that causal relationships of the future are generally knowable. The second is the assumption of additivity: that the behaviors of a whole are a scaled reflection of that whole’s disaggregated parts. With this assumption, knowing the parts provides full knowledge of the whole, creating the belief that all wholes are knowable through aggregating the knowledge of their parts.

#Reviewing Bitskrieg

#Reviewing Bitskrieg

In Bitskrieg, John Arquilla distills much from his three decades of advocacy about networked warfare into a compact volume accessible to a wide audience. He displays a continuing ability to produce provocative arguments and engaging books. The tenets of Bitskrieg are consistent with many of Arquilla’s previous writings. These include the point that networked warfare or netwar encompasses cyber conflict but extends beyond it.

Why Non-U.S. Militaries Should Adopt the U.S. Army Design Methodology

Why Non-U.S. Militaries Should Adopt the U.S. Army Design Methodology

How militaries address problems is crucial to their success as an organization. Militaries use many different planning tools to solve operational problems. Some of these tools follow a structured methodology. Others are a state-of-mind and a way of thinking that is not confined within boundaries. Instead of just solving a problem, these approaches help to solve the right problem.

#Reviewing What is the Worst That Could Happen?

#Reviewing What is the Worst That Could Happen?

Let us not turn away in the face of unattainable limits. Instead, we should push those limits and make our best attempt to imagine the unthinkable and prepare accordingly. That being said, there is no free lunch. How much time and money ought the U.S. government allocate to wargaming worst cases, or on a smaller scale, ought you devote to reading this book? The first question is too large for this review, but I will say that What Is The Worst That Could Happen? was well worth my $37.95 and an afternoon’s time, and I am confident that any reader of The Bridge will feel the same.

A New Plan: Using Complexity In the Modern World

A New Plan: Using Complexity In the Modern World

This approach takes the traditional ends/ways/means strategy of the industrial era and attempts to contend with the modern environment by obtaining information dominance through understanding an ill-structured problem. But as good as your intelligence might be, if you receive an assessment that predicts the unpredictable, you would be wise to question the sourcing. While one might sympathize with Eisenhower's notion that planning has its own virtues divorced of the result, the reliance on the predictability of inputs and outputs of a linear equation are erroneous. With complexity, outcomes become disproportionate and hence non-linear approaches are required.