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

We Want It, What Is It? Unpacking Civilian Control of the Military

We Want It, What Is It? Unpacking Civilian Control of the Military

The nomination of James Mattis as Secretary of Defense briefly brought the often overlooked concept of civilian control of the military to public attention. Commentators debated whether Mattis’ qualifications, personality, and presumed influence on the administration justified an exception to the law prohibiting recently retired generals from serving in that post. Reassuringly, in that discussion as well as in the larger conversation about the unusual number of retired and acting general officers now serving in traditionally civilian posts, there has been no discernible challenge to the notion of civilian control of the military. Yet underneath this consensus as to the desirability of civilian control, hide differences in understanding about what it actually entails. In short, we want civilian control but do not precisely know what it is.

#Reviewing A History of Strategy

#Reviewing A History of Strategy

Strategists are a critical bunch. After all, critical analysis is an important skill for those involved in scrutinizing international relations, history, and policy to generate insights. It is therefore curious that Martin Van Creveld’s book A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind immediately opens itself to the nitpicking of strategists in two related regards. First, the treatment of such a vast topic is too brief, running just 124 pages. Second, as a natural extension of its brevity, the details about the strategists it addresses are rather sparse. If the reader is able to overlook these limitations, however, A History of Strategy is a useful overview of the figures and ideas that form the canon of strategic thought.

#Reviewing Insurgency and Counterinsurgency

#Reviewing Insurgency and Counterinsurgency

As the armies of the West begin a shift away from counterinsurgency (COIN) and the US Army, in particular, renews its focus on peer on peer warfare, the timing of the publication of Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies by Jeremy Black could seem to have missed the COIN revolution. In the age of a resurgent Russia annexing the Crimea and threatening Baltic NATO members with a similar fate, is COIN still relevant or is it an idea to confine to a dusty shelf while the West learns how to confront Russian cross domain coercion and multi-domain battle? Despite the cognitive shift from COIN back to a paradigm of armor and mechanization, “wars amongst the people” - a phrase that popularized in Rupert Smith's The Utility of Force - are here to stay.

Next War: #Wargaming the Changing Character of Competition and Conflict

Next War: #Wargaming the Changing Character of Competition and Conflict

Recently the Office of the Chief of Staff of the Army, Strategic Studies Group used future decision games to investigate major contingencies possible in the next twenty-years.  Similarly, a group of Marine, Army, and Air Force officers in the Marine Corps University, Advanced Studies Program are constructing a series of campaign-level decision games to hypothesize new manned-unmanned teaming concepts. In each case, small teams visualize future war and describe the military problems likely to confront Coalition and Joint forces engaged in multi-domain battle.  These teams develop a mission, a concept of operations and articulate a theory of victory and the required capabilities, joint functions, and considerations to achieve it (such as doctrine, organizations, training, etc.).  They learn and adapt short of the feedback of actual battle.

Communicating Uncertainty in #Wargaming Outcomes

Communicating Uncertainty in #Wargaming Outcomes

With these games will come a far greater deluge of information, requiring of leaders a greater skill, a more urgent need to make sense of it all and inform decisions. Since the dawn of man and war, we have seen technology improve our ability to strike targets and wage war, and we should expect the same learning curve in our application of these three principles for communicating uncertainty together with advances in simulation and computation. At the dawn of airpower in World War I, hundreds of bombs fell before single targets were destroyed. Today we hit single targets within hundreds of centimeters. In the next war, we will be required to use information, like the uncertainty implicit in the outcomes of a hundred wargames, to create strategic effects with the same precision. This simple introduction to communicating uncertainty may be analogous to those early days, to a single bomb dropped in the first World War. Hopefully, though, the utility of these ideas is more readily apparent and their potential will be realized more quickly.

#Wargaming for Strategic Planning

#Wargaming for Strategic Planning

Wargaming is not just a planning process step for military staffs but includes a variety of methodologies that are useful in informing strategic decision making and aiding in the development of strategies and contingency plans prior to or during detailed planning. By bringing wargaming into the planning process early and often, a staff can enable the inclusion of a wide variety of information and escape the often-hyper-focused mentality that comes at the initiation of a headquarters planning process. Finally, for those potential wargame sponsors, there are numerous military, academic, and private capabilities to enable the design, execution and analysis of wargames to address their objectives.

#Wargaming Unpredictable Adversaries (and Unreliable Allies)

#Wargaming Unpredictable Adversaries (and Unreliable Allies)

One challenge in wargaming, and especially political-military (POL-MIL) games, is how to best model the behavior of unpredictable, even apparently irrational, foes. Is the mercurial behavior of North Korea’s “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong-un, Boko Haram in northern Nigeria, or Joseph Kony of the Lord’s Resistance Army truly irrational, or is it simply the product of a very different set of interests and objectives sustained by a very different world-view? To what extent do seemingly erratic aspects of their strategic behavior derive instead from factors we don’t understand well, such as internal politics or decision-making process? It has been well established since the POL-MIL wargaming of the 1950s and 1960s that actions that one actor believes to be rational signals of intent or deterrence are often entirely misunderstood by their intended recipient, in large part because they are deeply shaped by internal decision making processes that opponents fail to appreciate or understand. How do we incorporate this into wargames when, almost by definition, we do not fully understand what is going on?

In the Mind of the Enemy: Psychology, #Wargames, and the Duel

In the Mind of the Enemy: Psychology, #Wargames, and the Duel

Over the last eighteen months, the Australian podcast the Dead Prussian has asked each of its guests a simple yet deeply contested question: “What is war?”  Answers have ranged from Professor Hal Brand’s insightful “war is a tragic but inescapable aspect of international politics” to my own citation of John Keegan’s “war is collective killing for some collective purpose.”Nobody so far has said that war is a “game”.  Thankfully this isn’t surprising; anyone who has fought in war, or just studied it, will be aware that this would trivialise the destruction that can lie within.  But it is also of note that nobody so far has labeled war as a duel.

The Strategic Importance of #Wargaming

The Strategic Importance of #Wargaming

This latest series on #wargaming will spend this week analyzing that process and assess factors that may be overlooked. The Strategy Bridge has lined up a broad community of subject matter experts and stakeholders to explore several types of wargames to spark a conversation not only about how we design war games, but also about how we communicate the critical lessons learned.

What if Saudi Arabia were Poor?

What if Saudi Arabia were Poor?

America benefits from Saudi Arabia’s wealth. By virtue of being rich in oil reserves, and able to spend the proceeds from that oil however its royal family sees fit, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has great sway in the Middle East. Instances of the Kingdom’s impact include the multinational coalition it currently leads against the Shi’a Houthi regime in Yemen and its continuing power within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).Saudi Arabia’s wealth is important to those interested in US foreign policy because America is an unofficial guarantor of Saudi sovereignty, tacitly giving assurance that it will protect the Kingdom from invasion.  It is also important because the US leverages its relationship with Saudi Arabia to implement its policy in the region. From the US’ perspective, an affluent Saudi Arabia helps America get what it wants.

#Reflections on War: The Day bin Laden Died

#Reflections on War: The Day bin Laden Died

At this point it has become a cliché. Everyone knows where he or she was when JFK was shot. The same goes for 9/11. Such moments forge historic waypoints for our lives and occasion us to ask broad questions: What does it mean to be an American? What is the state of U.S. power in the world? Or, more simply, are we truly safe? Recently, I’ve been thinking back to another milestone – May 2, 2011 - the raid in Abbottabad, and killing of Osama bin Laden. It has now been six years. For most Americans, May 2 lacks the emotional power of a December 7 or September 11. This may reflect a human tendency to internalize and remember tragedy over triumph. Nevertheless, I submit that we overlooked something in our collective response to the bin Laden killing. Furthermore, the national conversation failed to address some stark questions surrounding not only Osama’s death, but also its implications for the more general application of military force. As we trudge along with what will be the longest shooting war in our nation’s history – 15 years, 5 months – my thoughts drift back to that Monday morning.

How to Build a Virtual Clausewitz

How to Build a Virtual Clausewitz

In many ways, military forces using AI on the battlefield is not new at all.  At a simplistic level, the landmine is perhaps a good starting example.  The first known record of landmines was in the 13th Century in China and they emerged in Europe somewhere between 1500 and 1600.  Most landmines are not intelligent and all and apply a binary logic of “kill” or “don’t kill.”  What landmines lack, and one of the primary reasons they are banned by most countries, is the ability to use just and discriminate force.  As far as computers have come since the British used “The Bombe” to break the Enigma code, the human mind still has an advantage in determining the just and discriminate use of force and thinking divergently about the second and third order effects resulting from the use of force.  But, according to some, that advantage may not last for long.

#Reviewing Military Leadership Lessons for Public Service

#Reviewing Military Leadership Lessons for Public Service

The new presidential administration includes more veterans in cabinet-level positions than any administration in recent memory, a point that has sparked debate among public policy experts. On one hand, Daniel Benjamin, a professor at Dartmouth College and former official at the State Department, says former military officers in civilian positions is “a matter of deep concern,” because “Generals as a rule believe in hierarchies and taking orders…Generals have one set of skills, and diplomacy is not in the top drawer of that tool kit.”[i] Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) disagrees and contends, “The United States military…produces real leaders, people who know how to solve problems and take a very structured approach in doing so.”[ii] In Military Leadership Lessons for Public Service, Charles Szypszak explores the principles and methods of military leadership and argues they are effective for public service.[iii] Szypszak’s book will be especially valuable to service members who are interested in post-military public service, from the policy-making level to service in city and county governments.

The Twilight Between Knowing and Not Knowing

The Twilight Between Knowing and Not Knowing

In late 2016 the United Nations Special Adviser for the prevention of genocide warned the international community that potential existed for ethnically fueled violence being perpetrated in South Sudan ‘to spiral into genocide’. In parallel, the #Neveragain social media campaign sought to link a perceived lack of international empathy for the plight of refugees, and increasingly restrictive border controls, with post-Second World War international commitments to never again allow genocide to occur. Indeed, even here at The Strategy Bridge there has been increased interest in seeking to understand the political calculus of mass murder and how it might explain the actions of the Islamic State. Yet for all this discussion, it appears that interested observers are actually no closer to understanding how to recognise if and why genocide is, or is not, occurring. This confusion stems from the fact that the actual recognition of genocide is inherently difficult. It is this difficulty that will be examined here, through the prism of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Whistling Past the Cyber Graveyard

Whistling Past the Cyber Graveyard

It seems not a day passes that a new cyber security incident is not reported.  Whether it is the breach of email accounts at Yahoo, the networks at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) or John Podesta’s digital recipe box, the revelations draw the attention of a wide variety of news organizations, and the stories each seem to approach a level of critical mass until a new story  emerges.  These incidents are all different in scope, and their targets are in the crosshairs of both criminals and hostile intelligence organizations - for motives that vary from political, to monetary, to just plain mischief.  No matter the intent of the cyber criminal, the government’s response ought to prevent escalation along the cybercrime continuum.  What Americans have seen to this point is network access and data exfiltration – or more simply said: breaking, entering, and theft.

West Africa’s Decisive Intervention: A Lesson in Strategy

West Africa’s Decisive Intervention: A Lesson in Strategy

The waning weeks of 2016 and the first month of 2017 witnessed one of the most strategically effective uses of military force in the 21st century. When long-time President of the Gambia, Yahya Jammeh, refused to step down after being voted out of office, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) sponsored a Senegalese-led intervention that forced Jammeh to leave the country.  This intervention upheld the integrity of the Gambian democratic process and allowed the victor, Adama Barrow, to assume leadership of the small West African country. The ECOWAS intervention force assembled the means to impose its will on their opponent, formulated and executed a strategy calibrated to achieve the political effects desired, and achieved all of its policy goals--all without firing a single shot.

Not Dead Yet

Not Dead Yet

Numerous voices have claimed that the day of conventional war is over. For years, these voices have predicted that “war amongst the people,” or “hybrid war,” or “gray zone operations,” or “distributed security missions,” are the new face of war. But conventional war—however it may be changing—may not be as dead as some believe. Danger is already emerging from the confluence of several unfolding trends. 

#Reviewing Doomed to Succeed: Rethinking Middle East Assumptions

#Reviewing Doomed to Succeed: Rethinking Middle East Assumptions

Assumptions form the bedrock of any strategy. The choice of ways and means to achieve a particular outcome or objective is based on the assumption that those choices will lead to an expected result. Assumption is just one of many reasons flexibility is the key to good strategy - assumptions must be continuously analyzed for their efficacy. One major assumption at the root of the United States’ strategy in the Middle East has stood the test of time: the US needs Arab oil, or the continued flow of oil out of the Middle East, therefore it must remain on good terms with its oil-exporting Arab allies. It would follow that Arab disdain for Israel suggests the US should put distance between itself and Israel in favor of better relations with its Arab allies. Dennis Ross, in Doomed to Succeed: The US-Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama, is rethinking this assumption and Middle East analysts, policy makers, and strategists should listen.