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

Risk

Risk Hindered Decision Making: How the DoD’s Faulty Understanding of Risk Jeopardizes its Strategy

Risk Hindered Decision Making: How the DoD’s Faulty Understanding of Risk Jeopardizes its Strategy

This article contests the U.S. military’s current risk framework and provides an initial vector for how to consider risk in strategic competition. In doing so I also dismantle the U.S. military’s nascent risk “actions:” accept, avoid, reduce, and transfer. Using systems theory as a foundation, I illustrate how risk cannot be created or destroyed but can be accepted in its current state or transferred to another state. Finally, I recommend two revisions to the way the U.S. military measures risk to better derive clarity for commanders: increasing the precision of measurements and expanding the temporal scope to better assess cumulative risks.

Means-Based Decision-Making: A Case for The Metaphysics of Strategy

Means-Based Decision-Making: A Case for The Metaphysics of Strategy

This article offers a re-balanced definition of strategy that uses classical metaphysics to ground the term in an implementable framework. In leaving the methods for generating prudent ideas for strategy open, the Department of Defense definition has perhaps invited an over-reliance on postmodern ideology that neglects objective concepts and objective reasoning. Postmodern thought emphasizes subjectivity in creating conditions for creativity to flourish. Classical metaphysics, on the other hand, emphasizes objective truths about mankind and reality. In suggesting appropriate boundaries using classical metaphysics, the proposed definition preserves the creative flexibility demanded in the emerging operational environment and championed by postmodern thought that rightly—if perhaps inordinately—impacts the current discussion on military strategy.

Sleepwalking into Risk: Learning from the U.S. Navy Surface Fleet

Sleepwalking into Risk: Learning from the U.S. Navy Surface Fleet

Producing new fighter pilots is not an overnight proposition. Increasing the capacity of production pipelines is a costly and long-term endeavor; as a result, the Air Force has proposed short-term capacity gains by operating the fighter pilot training systems at surge tempo and shortening time in the pipeline through syllabus reductions. Correspondingly, an oversupply of new fighter graduates with less-developed airmanship skills transfers risk to front-line units. Recent incidents within the U.S. Navy’s surface fleet offer a cautionary tale of unacknowledged systemic risks. What can the Air Force learn from the fleet as it attempts to reverse the downward flightpath of the fighter pilot force structure, modernize for peer competition, and continue armed-overwatch in U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility?

Prospect Theory and the Problem of Strategy: Lessons from Sicily and Dien Bien Phu

Prospect Theory and the Problem of Strategy: Lessons from Sicily and Dien Bien Phu

The inability or unwillingness to recognize defeat and its implications resulted in both greater material losses and amplified the strategic consequences for inevitable failures. Strategy is a human endeavor, and prospect theory offers unique insights into another dimension of the human face of war, providing a framework for examination of paradoxical decision making and human error in strategy and tactics.

Aligning Risk Tolerance to Meet the Demands of Complex Strategic Problems

Aligning Risk Tolerance to Meet the Demands of Complex Strategic Problems

Leaders in the national security community must remedy the incapacitating risk aversion which has permeated both the civilian and military ranks of the defense establishment if they are to successfully respond to the inherent uncertainty of future conflicts. Risk aversion stifles creativity, cedes the initiative to our adversaries, and presents a real, significant, and imminent threat to American national security. However, with the proper application of existing tools and an appropriate organizational comfort with uncertainty, strategic leaders can overcome the challenges posed by an increasingly complex world.

The Weaker Foe – Part 3: Transforming to Win Future Wars

The Weaker Foe – Part 3: Transforming to Win Future Wars

For the past several decades the Army has promoted agile and adaptive leadership. This type of leadership is good when you are the strongest Army in the world and you’re focused on rapidly adapting to dynamic situations during operations. However, an entirely different type of leadership is necessary if you intend to transform the organization from the way it is today to the way you want it to be in the future. In the years ahead our Army needs transformational leaders who will shape our culture to one that demonstrates cunning, embraces asymmetry, generates unforeseen problems, and takes risks in order to win decisively.

The Weaker Foe

The Weaker Foe

For 70 years now the United States has fielded the most powerful military forces in the world. This has led to the US military staying physically, mentally, and culturally in their comfort zone, unwilling and largely unable to think the unthinkable; in a few decades the US Army may be in the position of those armies and non-state enemies we have fought since World War II, struggling to cope with deficits in forces, materiel, technologies, and personnel. In DOD terms we may very well be the “near-peer competitor;” smaller, technologically weaker, with older and less capable systems than those against whom we are called to go to war. In strategic terms, such a future scenario is plausible, possible, and, increasingly probable.

Accepting Risk: Why the Attack on the Swift Reveals Strategic Vulnerability

Accepting Risk: Why the Attack on the Swift Reveals Strategic Vulnerability

Addressing risk in this case is a simple math problem. Either the strategy needs to be resourced with the appropriate number and type of adequately survivable warships, or the scope of the strategy needs to be reduced. Hesitance in taking either course of action is instead a de facto decision to accept dire risk to U.S. geopolitical strategy.

Risk Articulation and Options in War: Telling a Story

Risk Articulation and Options in War: Telling a Story

In the end, providing an explicit and tangible articulation of risk allows military leaders to best inform strategy development and execution. This not only ensures better alignment of ends, ways, and means that will maximize the probability of accomplishing the desired policy objectives, it also ensures that national blood and treasure will not be needlessly spent through poorly developed strategy.

The Game of #Risk

The Game of #Risk

Through the following short essays, we intend to...[open] a dialog on risk that is long overdue. From doctrine to education, from tactics to strategy, the influence of risk has never been greater, yet receives far less attention that is rightfully necessary. If we are to regain the elusive “winning edge,” it begins with a deeper understanding and dialog on risk. It is time to bring risk out of the shadows and into the light where we can all see it, discuss it, and understand it.

Right, Wrong, & Relevant

Right, Wrong, & Relevant

...if the model is wrong, we must demand a new model more closely aligned to the question of interest, a model right enough to be useful. And this is not just a task for analysts and mathematicians, though it is our duty. This is a task for planners, strategists, operators, decision makers, and everyone else. We must seek the truth, even if we may not find it in all its Platonic perfection and even if its pursuit is paradoxical in the sense that it requires both humility and the belief that we can reach toward perfection.