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.
The U.S. military remains superior to its competitors and potential adversaries with respect to size, global engagement, and technological capabilities. However, the state of U.S. defense innovation, despite its resilience and superiority, suffers from structural erosion in spite of the fourth industrial revolution.
All the instruments of U.S. informational power must become stronger because of the surge of non-state actors in international affairs, the need to integrate advocacy and influence with more coercive tools of statecraft, and the urgency of again considering the war of ideas. The information environment of the 21st century will feature contested narratives, information blocking, Islamist social media, Russia’s hybrid warfare, and China’s three warfares.
A strategic opportunity to thaw the frozen conflicts in Ukraine may arise for all parties. Ukraine and the West must then decide the extent they are willing to sacrifice territory for stability, and Russia must come to terms on whether it can live with a semi-functional pro-Western government on its periphery.
An interesting read, but it will not be sharing space on my shelf of favorites, alongside other war poets such as Brian Turner, Marvin Bell, and Wilfred Owens. The book may, however, appeal to the casual poetry reader or to those trying a cross sample of the writing generated by individuals who fought this century’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Beyond the Beach is an essential addition to our understanding of the battle for France, these deaths, generally glossed over as “collateral damage,” profoundly shaped the French attitudes towards and understanding of the war. The work’s only shortcoming is that it teases but does not pursue many of its most interesting implications, leaving future scholars to build on its foundations.
As an exporter of professional military education, the U.S. has institutionalized western classics and ideas across the profession of arms around the globe. However, not all of the foundational classics of other civilizations have made their way to the required reading list. A common understanding of a challenge requires an understanding of our own fundamental points of reference for doctrine and strategy and an understanding of others.
While China has traditionally been threatened by a predominately domestic separatist movement, it appears that the war in Syria and the global influence and attention of the Islamic State has given China’s domestic terror groups the opportunity to expand and network with other groups in China’s regional neighbors.
Sentilles’s staccato collection presents as a meditation on the pulsing heritage that underscores life and death. In her Preface, she acknowledges, “I began writing these pages after seeing two photographs.” One was an innocuous photograph of a man, Howard Scott, holding a violin, while the other was of an unidentified detainee from Abu Ghraib. With this juxtaposition, Sentilles sets about to unravel their complicated legacies and reveal their common thread: war.
Despite progress since the height of Boko Haram in 2014, this violent extremist organization remains a significant threat to Nigeria and the Lake Chad Region. The eight-year conflict is now responsible for over 20,000 deaths, and the large-scale humanitarian crisis is on the verge of famine status. Nigeria’s long-term success is critically important to the United States in the strategic battleground of the African continent. Both the evolving Boko Haram threat and the decreasing patience of war-weary regional allies suggests a revitalized strategy is needed.
For Israel, ultimate survival tasks will necessarily be profoundly intellectual or analytic, and require utterly durable victories of "mind over mind" as well as more traditional ones of mind over matter.[1] These victories, in turn, will depend upon prior capacities to fully understand the prospectively many-sided elements of Cold War II. In principle, at least, such prior capacities could lead Israel to seriously consider certain preemption options.
The relative strategic importance of Japan and India in Asia will shift considerably over the next decade and more, with India becoming more important and Japan less important. South Asia in 2020 shows we cannot predict the future perfectly, but if we take the time to assess the right trends and look forward, we might be able to grasp its contours.
The patterns of Islamic seapower illustrated by MacDougall appear again in the present day. By engaging with this important book, modern naval and military thinkers will begin to develop an understanding of how naval and maritime power has been developed in the region in the past. This can result in a better framework for them to consider developments and naval strategy in the present and the future.
By definition, as long as particular countries regard their nuclear status as an asset, every state that is a member of the so-called nuclear club is a direct beneficiary of the Cold War. This is because all core elements of any national nuclear strategy, whether actual or still-contemplated, were originally conceptualized, shaped, and even codified within the earlier bipolar struggles of post World War II international relations. Nonetheless, as the world now enters into a more-or-less resurrected form of this initial struggle the strategic postures of each extant nuclear weapons state are being modified within the still-developing parameters of Cold War II.
While Jonathan Shay’s connections between Vietnam and Homer’s literature of war are one way of exploring the perennial risk of psychological injuries in war, the history of another country’s wars and experiences might offer a promising avenue of approach. Canadian historian Adam Montgomery’s book should thus be of interest to a wider audience than its subtitle alone might suggest. While students of Canadian military history will welcome it as a concise history of psychological injury and treatment in Canada’s wars since 1914, Montgomery usefully broadens the scope of the discussion. American readers, understandably preoccupied with the U.S. experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, will find the treatment of an allied and culturally similar military illuminating. Montgomery’s findings point to the startling ubiquity of psychological injuries in military operations of all types.
The invaluable lessons in this text only confirmed what I thought I knew about the two. What Dempsey and Brafman bring to the pages of this short, yet enduring book will help dampen the volume of the noise of the world, bring clarity to the fog of the digital battlefield, increase our trust for each other, and ultimately help us all be more inclusive leaders.
The United States Marine Corps entered World War I as a small arm of naval infantry. Three decades later, the Marine Corps was poised for war with enhanced amphibious and aviation capabilities that proved vital in defeating Imperial Japan. Pivotal to the transformation of the Marine Corps was the Battle of Belleau Wood in 1918.
Grand strategic coherence aligns ways across time, space, and scale to achieve ambitious and aspirational end-states with limited and disparate means. A nation places its legitimacy and strategic objectives at risk without a coherent grand strategy to discipline and maximize the utility of its diplomatic, military, and economic power.
There are several bilateral and multilateral agreements among nations to support inter-intra agency coordination and cooperation. There are also global security institutions such as United Nations Counter Terrorism Centre and its sister agencies such as United Nations Counter Terrorism Implementation Task Force. However, many of these agencies continue to operate independently. This is apparent in the case of the United Nations Security Council designated Counter Terrorism Directorate and the United Nations Counter Terrorism Executive Directorate that have few operational partners within the European Union and yet to begin meaningful interactions with NATO.
The question that must be faced is this: Can the EU manage its vast resources to maximise its information sharing with partner agencies and tighten its grip around radical Islamic factions returning to Europe? To answer this question and provide an appropriate response to various other underlying questions, we must better understand foreign fighter factions, their agenda, and their operational mechanism.
