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

#Reviewing Soldiers and Civilization

#Reviewing Soldiers and Civilization

What do the ideas of narrative as doctrine, Stoicism, defeat, chivalry, and fighting for pay tell us about the development of military professionalism in the West? In his new volume, Soldiers and Civilization: How the Profession of Arms Thought and Fought the Modern World into Existence, Reed Robert Bonadonna addresses the role these and other developments in military history played in the development of military professionalism. His book is a fascinating and deep journey through military and intellectual history, which seeks to bring a historical and literary focus to a topic that tends to be dominated by social scientists such as Samuel Huntington or by ethicists rooted in the military practice such as Anthony Hartle. This volume appears unique in its focus and brings an important voice to the debate over the sources and nature of military professionalism in the West.

Chinese State Sponsored Hacking: It’s Time To Reach an Effective and Lasting Bilateral Agreement on Cyberwarfare

Chinese State Sponsored Hacking: It’s Time To Reach an Effective and Lasting Bilateral Agreement on Cyberwarfare

It remains to be seen whether or not the current administration’s approach to  China will bring further progress in terms of limiting cyber attacks. Ultimately, extending the terms of the 2015 agreement to explicitly ban attacks, to encourage co-operation in hardening financial institutions against them, and perhaps even mandate bi-lateral responses should they occur, would be in the mutual interest of both the U.S. and China.

On the Business Models of War

On the Business Models of War

The ultimate question begged by these musings is to consider what effect more than fifty years of trying to implement business management models into the American military has had? Are we more efficient and monetarily lean than ever before? It doesn’t seem so. We have the world’s most expensive military, with the costliest equipment and highest operating margins. It is difficult to  draw a direct causal argument, despite the apparent correlation in time, and beyond the scope of this article to do so. The  argument is simply that military effectiveness is a matter that ought not to be judged by monetary value (profit or cost-savings efficiency) of the services performed, and it is thus not appropriate for business management models. More bluntly, whenever a public organization (as opposed to a private one) is so conceived the result will be unavoidably perverse.

The Failure of Joint Integration During the 1943 Sicily Campaign

The Failure of Joint Integration During the 1943 Sicily Campaign

The Allied invasion of Sicily, codenamed Operation HUSKY, was the first combined amphibious invasion of Axis territory involving both British and U.S. forces. Poor planning and a weak operational command structure resulted in mediocre command and control of the air, land, and sea components throughout the operation. If measured by current U.S. joint doctrine, the integration of joint functions by the Allies during the Sicily Campaign was below par, leading to missed opportunities and increased costs. While Operation HUSKY still resulted in the Allied conquest of Sicily, the failures of the Allies in command and control and joint function integration during the campaign would result in greater combat losses than necessary and diminished returns during the Sicily invasion, as well as substandard operations on the Italian peninsula. The failures of integration during the HUSKY campaign illustrate why mission command and joint operations are critical components of current U.S. defense doctrine.

#Reviewing Exporting Security: America’s Shift from Confrontation to Cooperation

#Reviewing Exporting Security: America’s Shift from Confrontation to Cooperation

The security challenges America faces in the twenty-first century are so geographically dispersed and so politically complex they can only be solved in partnership with American allies. Reveron believes that over the past two decades U.S. commanders quietly came to recognize this reality and transformed the military from a force of confrontation to one of cooperation.

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.