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

Weapons Acquisition and Strategic Uncertainty: Investigating the French Case

Weapons Acquisition and Strategic Uncertainty: Investigating the French Case

Even if universal in human activities, uncertainty is often absent from weapons procurement studies. Despite pioneering works of Scherer and Peck that recognize uncertainty as a main characteristic of weapons acquisitions, academic works that follow often do not investigate this feature in depth. Indeed, weapons procurement studies generally do not consider uncertainty as a crucial factor in explaining why weapon programs fail completely or encounter costs overrun, delays, and deficiencies in delivered capabilities. Explanations range very often from technologically overly ambitious military service’s technological over-ambitions to the deficient procurement strategies of their respective bureaucracy’s deficient procurement strategy. In this paper, we will go further in explaining why some programs fail to produce new weapon systems with in terms of costs, delays and capabilities. As the majority of academic works about weapons acquisition consider the U.S. case, we will bring some change by focusing on the French military establishment.

Modern Tragedy: How the Sicilian Expedition and the Iraq Campaign Exhibit Strategic Effects

Modern Tragedy: How the Sicilian Expedition and the Iraq Campaign Exhibit Strategic Effects

Thucydides, who authored the definitive account of the Peloponnesian War, started writing as soon as the conflict began, “...believing that it would be a great war, and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it.” His account has also proved valuable for evaluating ensuing conflicts through to the present day. As Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote, the Peloponnesian War showed that “strategic problems remain the same, though affected by tactical difficulties peculiar to each age.” The Athenian invasion of Sicily and the American experience in Iraq were not identical, but no two wars ever are. Instead, we must look at the overarching effects the military campaigns had on political objectives.

The New Era of the Proliferated Proxy War

The New Era of the Proliferated Proxy War

War in the modern world is changing. Since the end of the Cold War inter-state war has declined globally, whilst even civil wars have become a relative rarity. But war is not becoming an obsolete element of human interaction. Governments and militaries around the world are simply changing the way that their strategic objectives are secured. This is the era of indirect war by proxy.

The Nature of Military Doctrine: A Decade of Study in 1500 Words

The Nature of Military Doctrine: A Decade of Study in 1500 Words

Doctrine, in its modern form, consists of series of written manuals that, together, are representative of a military’s institutional belief system. For all that I have learned about doctrine over the past decade, the most important thing is that whatever the pros and cons of doctrine itself may be, the belief system underlying it and the broader context in which the doctrine exists are much more difficult to perceive, study and understand; yet both are also much more important. No study of doctrine can be complete without taking these factors into account.

Multi-Domain Battle: Meeting the Cultural Challenge

Multi-Domain Battle: Meeting the Cultural Challenge

Major military innovation is often accompanied by tension between the camps representing the old guard who fight to preserve their place in the existing way of war and the disrupters who lay claim to a potential new order. There is much at stake in these cultural struggles in which fights over status, authority, budget, and pathways to high rank are relatively minor manifestations when considered alongside the main event—military effectiveness in future wars. However, Multi-Domain Battle as the U.S. Army’s future warfighting concept has not yet faced much challenge or criticism, at least not in public.

#Reviewing Lead Yourself First

#Reviewing Lead Yourself First

To lead others one must first seek to lead themselves. Solitude creates the necessary white space and opportunity to mature as leaders. Solitude also provides an opportunity to better connect with intuition, which allows our minds to connect the dots, find patterns, and bridge the gap between the conscious and subconscious. Through solitude and reflection, we can unveil our core values, strengthen our resolve, and gain perspective. Each of these are required to lead effectively.

The Trinity and the Law of War

The Trinity and the Law of War

The trinity is a useful tool to conceptualize the chaos of war and has been described as the tension between three fundamental elements of war: the government, the people, and the army. The legal discipline, whether intentionally or not, reflects this trinity in the development of the modern day law of war. Contemporary law of war reveals a sort of legal trinity in which legal documents seek to regulate each point of Clausewitz’s paradoxical trinity. In the legal trinity, the Charter of the United Nations holds the position of the government, the Geneva Conventions represents the people, and the Rules of Engagement cover the military.

Armistice Day: An Encounter at the Cenotaph

Armistice Day: An Encounter at the Cenotaph

From the void within the empty tomb, silence resonates, and the Remembrance Day ceremonies have been held at the Cenotaph for over ninety years, changing little from the original ones in 1920. Over time, it has come to reflect the memory of all British military personnel who perished in successive conflicts, from the European battlefields of World War II to the remote villages of Helmand Province. Though the comrades of the “Glorious Dead” of the Great War are now gone, the Cenotaph still stands, in quiet and dignified repose.

Mimicking Rome: Adapting to the Nimbleness of New Threats

Mimicking Rome: Adapting to the Nimbleness of New Threats

The western world today—the United States and Europe—finds itself in a position similar to that of  the late Roman Empire. Despite renewed threats from Russia and an ascendant China, the chances of another great power or world war are small. Technological advances and the realities of a global economy upon which all the great powers depend make such unpalatable, even for the most bellicose. While we ought to be prepared for the possibility of such a conflict, it cannot be the primary focus.

#Reviewing Nine Days In May

#Reviewing Nine Days In May

Battles like Ia Drang, Con Tien, Khe Sanh, and Hue standout in the history of the American war in South Vietnam. While hardly typical, those clashes resonate well in popular histories and documentaries. On the other hand, transpiring on tracks of land away from large urban areas and not on some named, fortified hilltop—and at a time when multiple larger American military operations occurred across South Vietnam—nine May battles took place that lacked the consistent intensity of the aforementioned engagements, but typified the experience of many in Vietnam. Although these May battles were both remote physically and mentally for those not involved, participants experienced the savagery that came with the few, intense instances of contact with the enemy.

The Death of American Conventional Warfare: It’s the Political Willpower, Stupid

The Death of American Conventional Warfare: It’s the Political Willpower, Stupid

Conventional Warfare is officially dead. This has become an obvious trend with innumerable adversaries engaging the American military and her allies in unconventional ways and means. The long-held notion of the ‘decisive battle’ that brings the combat power of two nations against each other for a winner-take-all slugfest lies in the next grave. Even ‘wars of attrition’, in the model of the American Civil War, First and Second World Wars, and Korea are gone. If America hopes to remain strategically significant, its political and military leadership must adapt to the new reality that no adversary wants to fight the United States (U.S.) in a symmetrically conventional fashion.

The New Testament of Strategic Innovation: Three Paths to the Promised Land

The New Testament of Strategic Innovation: Three Paths to the Promised Land

Technology and military organizations exist in a paradoxical relationship. The relentless march of science creates pressure on strategists and their organizations to adopt novel technology and adapt their doctrine. This pressure can derive from technological innovation by one’s own scientists as well as the fear of what a potential enemy is developing on its side. Yet, as political scientist Stephen Rosen points out, organizations, and especially military organizations, have difficulty changing because “they are designed not to change.” A bureaucracy is organized to perform established tasks with uniformity and regularity. This inherent attribute presents the strategic innovator with a dilemma; a military organization must innovate to survive, but it resists innovation by its very nature. This problem is exacerbated by the reality that the direction and timing of optimal innovation is often ambiguous in the moment and only clear in hindsight.

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.

Typos on the Skin of Men: The Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq

Typos on the Skin of Men: The Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq

Given their worldview and resources, the Coalition Provisional Authority did about as well as one could hope. But the next time the United States finds itself in the nation-building business, our policies should be guided less by ideology, and more by humility, historical understanding, and simple respect for the dignity of our foreign partners.

Theory, Strategy, Context, and Execution

Theory, Strategy, Context, and Execution

Military theory is a way of distilling the raw materials of history into a concentrated, potent form that educates the strategist and commander. In this way, theory can serve as a starting point for strategy. While sound military theory is a good starting point for strategy, however, context and execution matter. The positive impacts of theory upon strategy are often limited by the context in which theoretical principles are applied, and by the commander’s judgment and skill in applying them.

Disruption in the Trinity

Disruption in the Trinity

Scholars of Clausewitz have gone to great pains to distinguish and connect the primary trinity of passion, chance, and reason with the secondary trinity of people, military, and government. In repudiating the Powell Doctrine’s focus on only the secondary trinity, Hew Strachan points out the the triad of people, military, and government are the “application” of the trinity—they are elements of the “state, not of war.” But for Antulio Echevarria, an equally erroneous position would be to ignore the secondary trinity, as he argues Clausewitz was clear in drawing the connection between the intrinsic and the institutional. In taking a position diametrically opposed to van Creveld, Echevarria suggests we risk divorcing Clausewitz from the “practical concerns of the debates of his day.”

#Reviewing Destined for War: An Interview with Graham Allison

#Reviewing Destined for War: An Interview with Graham Allison

In many ways the Peloponnesian War was a maritime struggle—the Athenians built their empire through their navy, the culminating point of the war was the failed Syracuse expedition where Athens lost 200 ships, and the war finally ended when Athens surrendered a decade later after the remainder of its fleet was destroyed by Sparta at Aegospotami. In The History of the Peloponnesian War, Athenian exile Thucydides details how his native city-state’s empire and power expanded throughout the Hellenic World, often at the relative expense of status quo power Sparta.

The Nature of Strategy: Pericles and the Peloponnesian War

The Nature of Strategy: Pericles and the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides’s account of the Peloponnesian War provides for a range of lessons about the nature of strategy applicable to a wide audience. The period demonstrates the inherent complexity in understanding the concept of strategy, a concept that remains devoid of a coherent, agreed, and universal definition. What the Periclean strategy does provide, however, is insight into the importance of understanding the implications of the political objective, strategy and military culture, and geography and operating environment and their influence on the nature of strategy.

Enhancing Strategic Education in the Middle East: Envisioning a Pan-Arab Security and Defence College

Enhancing Strategic Education in the Middle East: Envisioning a Pan-Arab Security and Defence College

National and multinational defence colleges have long provided a significant method of enhancing the strategic thinking skills and inter-cultural networks of national leaders, to better prepare them for developing and implementing national security doctrines and policies, and coordinating crisis management and informal diplomatic efforts. The creation of a pan-Arab security and defence college could provide a mutually-beneficial means for Arab nations to deliver coordinated, strategic-level education for a community of future Arab leaders and allied officers with regional influence.