The Next War series on The Strategy Bridge publishes decision games designed to help military professionals visualize and describe the changing character of war and warfare.
Gaming the Future with #NextWar: Kaliningrad Fires
What Talent Management Could Look Like
What is a Presidential Doctrine?
Historically, however, a presidential doctrine has served to define the national interest of a specific administration in a public manner, informing the American people and their allies, as well as putting potential adversaries on notice. Presidential doctrines did not define a specific strategy a president would pursue, their administration's worldview, or how they would utilize American power.
Bay of Pigs: A Case Study in Strategic Leadership and Failed Assumptions
Marching Together But Not In Time: #Reviewing In Cadence
It would be a mistake to think the underlying truth in the work lies in any single poem or set of poems. Instead of the individual poems themselves, it is in the contrast between the fears, hopes, and dreams of the two authors—and by extension their respective generations—that the reader will find the greatest revelation.
#Reviewing A Tale of Two Navies
The shared history of both the American and British people and their navies, in concert with shared visions for how the world ought to function is indeed special. But, beyond simply being special, this relationship is critical in underwriting global security. A Tale of Two Navies has a place on the shelves of all who study and strive to understand the importance of effective maritime partnerships and strategy.
Distributed Lethality and the Failure to Break Naval Stovepipes
The U.S. Navy faces a demanding challenge to recover its ability to generate high tempo unrelenting operations. A skilled naval maneuver warfare capacity creates a multiplicity of overwhelming dilemmas for an enemy that shatters the enemy’s cohesion through unexpected but highly coordinated actions on, over, below and from the sea, including fully employing the advantages of littoral and archipelagic terrain.
Fellow Travelers: Managing Savagery and The Gerasimov Doctrine
Both ISIS and Russia seek to present themselves as a solution to unbearable problems. If they are simultaneously the cause of those problems, or seek to exacerbate them, that is irrelevant. Especially in the case of ISIS, they believe that if they make life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short enough, a given population will accept even draconian masters in exchange for peace and stability.
The Twilight Between Knowing and Not Knowing: The United Nations and International Apathy
The UN knew its response to the warnings about Rwanda was inadequate. It was afraid of another Somalia, not about the potential for genocide in Rwanda. Its response was shaped by what it believed the five permanent members of the UNSC would support rather than an objective assessment of what the situation required. This meant UN staff began to deny their own responsibility and capacity to act. Indeed, the UN failed at all levels to understand what was taking place; this allowed it to keep up the pretence of knowing nothing, while doing even less.
African Solutions to African Problems: #Reviewing Composite Warfare
Within lies both the necessary pragmatism with which a practitioner must approach thinking about African wars, but also the necessary idealism of “African Solutions to African Problems,” which is what Barlow ultimately desires. If only as a way to frame the conversation about the nature of intervention in Africa, the significance of the book moves from useful to indispensable.
#Reviewing A History of Warfare
Montgomery makes us think of whether our current debates are worth the destabilisation that they could produce, “The peace we enjoy now is the peace of victory over the beast in men, and this victory will not survive if the virtues which gained and sustain it are lost...What worth is peace without freedom, or freedom without justice between one man and another.” The conversation between past and present is the most important takeaway from The History of Warfare and the lasting legacy of an old soldier.
Organizational Agility: Winning in Today’s Complex Environment
What does it take for militaries to win in today’s interconnected, interdependent, and complex environment? I would argue that in contrast with the battlefield of the past, today’s environment demands much more organizational agility, the degree to which a team or company is resourceful and adept at flexing in response to both internal and external factors.
U.S. Strategy for al Qaeda and ISIS: It’s Groundhog Day
The current situation in Syria reminds us again that we are failing in our post-9/11 wars. We have accomplished neither the strategic objectives set forth by the Bush administration nor those of the Obama administration. Both administrations have had notable successes and achieved periodic tactical and operational progress, but neither created sustained strategic success...We must reset our thinking.
Five Things That Helped Carl von Clausewitz Become A Great Strategic Thinker
While Carl von Clausewitz is often quoted, in reality his treatise On War is rarely studied in depth. In times when the U.S. military struggles to find its strategic footing, however, reading and debating Clausewitz’s complex ideas are needed more now than ever before. Perhaps even the times and conditions in which he developed them deserve a second look, for they contain lessons about how strategic thinkers grow and develop.
The Necessity of Self-Sacrifice
Self-sacrifice as a first principle helps strategists to remain faithful to the essential characteristics of a nation’s vital national interests, and it can prevent them from getting lost in moral absolutism when taken as a first among equals rather than as an overriding imperative. In other words, an attitude of self-sacrifice enables strategists to make strategic choices. This principle of self-abnegation is of foremost importance to strategists because its antithesis in limited wars effectively precludes the proper function of strategy and thereby undermines the utility of war.
#Reviewing Air Power: A Global History
#Reviewing Somme: Into The Breach
Hugh Sebag-Montefiore took advantage of the Somme’s centenary year to publish "Somme: Into the Breach," a weighty and well-documented volume privileging the voices and accounts of the men who fought it. He uses letters and diaries to resurrect the combatants as real men, husbands and fathers, while showing us unflinchingly how they suffered and died.
Learning From The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were a highly successful terrorist organization who were famous for successfully forming a fully functional military. Their fight for separation from the Sri Lankan government lasted a quarter century, and parallels can be drawn between the Sri Lankan conflict and the current situation in the Middle East (and elsewhere).
Beyond the Ticking Time Bomb: A Case for NCO Ethical Education
Tet à Tête: Vietnamese Exploitation of American Misapprehension
The Tet Offensive was a shock and a surprise for the Americans, where despite the high death toll the Americans inflicted on the Vietnamese, the Americans still lost. The Americans did not understand the restrictions and limitations they placed on themselves: the ideology of anti-Communism and exceptionalist pro-Democracy. But the Vietnamese did.