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

Social Choice: A Personal Theory of Power in Preferences, Choices, and Strategy

Social Choice: A Personal Theory of Power in Preferences, Choices, and Strategy

There are many sources of power, but this essay focuses on choice-theoretic research and social choice in particular. Social choice concerns the process by which individual preferences are aggregated into collective choices through group decision processes such as voting. I hope to convince the reader that strategists ought to be thinking about social choice and its implications for the complexity of attaining stable agreement. It is by pondering the nature of social choice that we truly understand why the strategist is a “hero.”

Cyber Power: A Personal Theory of Opportunity, Leverage, and Yet…Just Power

Cyber Power: A Personal Theory of Opportunity, Leverage, and Yet…Just Power

Cyberspace is enabling new forms of communication, influence, awareness, and power for people around the world. Families use cyberspace to communicate face-to-face over great distances. Financial institutions execute global business and commodity trades at the speed of light through the cyberspace domain. The world’s citizens are granted unprecedented access to information, facilitating more awareness and understanding than at any time in history. Yet the same cooperative domain that fosters so much good for mankind also offers a tremendous source of power.

Joint Action: A Personal Theory of Power

Joint Action: A Personal Theory of Power

Despite the historical success of joint action, many professional warriors and strategists continually debate which military function is most decisive in the termination of war. Even today, some question whether it is indeed worth the effort to work through the complications of combining competing strategies into effective joint action. My personal theory of joint action proposes an artful blend of both sequential and cumulative strategies to conduct unified operations that most effectively achieve our national objectives. Strategic effect is reduced when either cumulative or sequential strategies are parochially subordinated to the other, since there is no single, decisive function, service, or role in war.

Defense Industrial Base: A Personal Theory of Power and A Path to Achieving Political Objectives Independently

Defense Industrial Base: A Personal Theory of Power and A Path to Achieving Political Objectives Independently

Defense industrial base issues are almost always discussed in a contextual vacuum — as if their history begins with World War II factories or with President Eisenhower’s 1961 warning of a growing industrial complex. But manufacturing materiel is as ancient as war itself.

The Cognitive Domain: A Personal Theory of Power

The Cognitive Domain: A Personal Theory of Power

Complementary mental models hold the social world together. It’s not the lines painted on the road that keep us from careening into each other on the highway, as we sadly find out too often. Paper money has no intrinsic value on its own, unless you like the pictures and holograms, are trying to start a fire, need a bookmark, or have just run out of toilet paper. Online credit purchases do not even require the plastic card anymore, and only work because we collectively believe that strings of ones and zeros — stored electronically in computers that we’ll never see — equal our right to receive services and things from other people, and keep them. In all of these cases, it’s not about the symbolic artifact. Our agreements about what those artifacts represent, and our willingness to act on those beliefs, are what keep the wheels of society turning.

Theory Properly Constructed: A Starting Point for our Personal Theories of Power

Theory Properly Constructed: A Starting Point for our Personal Theories of Power

“Questions are our best friends for the invention and refinement of strong useful theory, and they are the lethal enemies of poor theory,” Colin Gray reminds us. Now its time to put that idea to the test, ever mindful of the Master’s aim for theory: "The primary purpose of any theory is to clarify concepts and ideas that have become, as it were, confused and entangled. Not until terms and concepts have been defined can one hope to make any progress in examining the question clearly and simply and expect the reader to share one’s views."

A Reformation: Reforming DoD’s Active Component Compensation System

A Reformation: Reforming DoD’s Active Component Compensation System

To make meaningful reforms to current personnel compensation programs, DoD needs to offer attractive options that provide active duty service members incentives and flexibility to chart their post-service careers. This will benefit DoD in the long run and, more importantly, it will energize the economy with new entrepreneurs backed by a healthcare package that provides peace of mind.

The Basics: Developing Leaders for Mission Command

The Basics: Developing Leaders for Mission Command

As Mission Command becomes truly institutionalized, other problems such as recruiting and training will also be aligned with it. The personnel system will also have to finally evolve to support a culture that embodies Mission Command. The culture will become one that rewards leaders and soldiers who act, and penalizes those who do not. Today’s culture needs to evolve so that the greater burden rests on all superior officers, who have to nurture—teach, trust, support and correct—the student who now enters the force with the ability to adapt from the day they are accessed until they leave the service. Otherwise, Mission Command will only remain a pipe dream, a hope from the past and meaningless words plastered all over power point presentations and one page in doctrine manuals.

Our Asymmetric World: Optimizing the Force

Our Asymmetric World: Optimizing the Force

The future of American military power is up for grabs. Between the myriad military strategies being debated and the ever-present uncertainty over the future budget, no one in the Department of Defense has any idea what our military will look like five years from now, much less ten. Every school of thought has its champion and listening to him or her will lead us to a finely tuned military — a world class institution that is unbeatable, within a set of finely marked boundaries. This would be an acceptable position if our country knew what our armed forces would be up to next. But we don’t.

Why The Periphery Matters: Have you ever heard of Epidamnus or Potidea?

Why The Periphery Matters: Have you ever heard of Epidamnus or Potidea?

One does not intend here to attempt pithy conclusions as to who is playing Athens and who is playing Sparta in the modern geopolitical game in Eastern Europe. That is the concern of the Catch-22 addressed by Park, which I commend to you. But another question worth considering in this matter is, regardless of your geopolitical worldview, who is playing the parts of Corinth and Corcyra? And should we be more weary of the periphery?

Epic Landpower Fail: Lack of Strategic Understanding

Epic Landpower Fail: Lack of Strategic Understanding

The U.S. Army will not be very successful in the coming operating environment unless it develops a sense of strategic understanding in its officers (and senior non-commissioned officers). For the purposes of this essay, strategic understanding is defined here as: awareness, comprehension, and ability to communicate broad purpose for the use of force and the relationship between tactical action and national policy. Trends tell us two things that demand this characteristic: first, landpower is inherently attributional; second, the Regionally Aligned Forces model ensures that the American Army will go to more places, faster, in smaller numbers, than ever before.

NATO’s Pivot to Russia: Cold War 2.0 at Sea?

NATO’s Pivot to Russia: Cold War 2.0 at Sea?

In response to Putin, NATO-building begins at home. We need NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division, fully focused on the Alliance’s core business, reaching out to the member states’ ordinary taxpayers. The changing European security environment requires an emphasis on the big messages: Defense, deterrence and security. Thus, zeitgeist-motivated campaigns should be stopped. In these times, NATO must tell the people what armies, air forces really are for and how our soldiers serve their countries and our Alliance.

Bioterrorism is Already Here: It Just Doesn't Look Like We Expected

Bioterrorism is Already Here: It Just Doesn't Look Like We Expected

The fact that our “global health security agenda” focuses on future pandemics and deliberate bioterror threats is laughable in the face of reemerging infectious diseases and slaughtered immunization workers. True health insecurity is present globally, and it should not require a mystery test tube and ill intent to be perceived as valid and pressing threat.

To Escalate or Not to Escalate?

To Escalate or Not to Escalate?

Understanding presidential decisions for and against increased force in ongoing conflicts is a significant and important endeavor. The implications include the impact on future decisions to commit troops in the first place—such as in Syria. National security decision making also affects civil-military relations, as well as the balance between executive and congressional powers. Finally, as escalation and de-escalation involves either mission creep or the need to adjust policy aims by taking an appetite suppressant, understanding its dynamics will illuminate leader perceptions, the difference between wartime realities and prewar expectations, and the impact on the U.S. debt and the American public.