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

Weakness into Strength: Overcoming Strategic Deficits in the 1948 Israeli War for Independence

Weakness into Strength: Overcoming Strategic Deficits in the 1948 Israeli War for Independence

Israel’s success in overcoming its imbalances in 1948 provides important lessons for the development of national strategy. Israel’s victory demonstrates how capable leadership can unite competing interests to create a professional military in a short period of time, how diplomatic and military efforts can complement each other, and how military principles such as mass and space can be manipulated. The 1948 war also helps the observer understand Israel’s strategic thinking in later conflicts and highlights the importance and possibilities of military organizational reform.

#Reviewing The Psychology of Strategy & Strategy, Evolution, and War

#Reviewing The Psychology of Strategy & Strategy, Evolution, and War

A new science of human behavior has emerged over the past two decades. This new science has linked together the research of neuroscientists, cognitive and evolutionary anthropologists, decision theorists, social and cross cultural psychologists, cognitive scientists, ethnologists, linguists, endocrinologists, and behavioral economists into a cohesive body of research on why humans do what they do. Research in this field rests on two propositions about the human mind. The first, that the mind is embodied; the second, that it is evolved.

Energizing the Silent Majority: Non-Resident Professional Military Education and Flexible Fellowships

Energizing the Silent Majority: Non-Resident Professional Military Education and Flexible Fellowships

The U.S. military is full of people with great ideas. Overwhelmingly, the debates raging around professional military education focus on maximizing the potential of those who attend resident programs, and completely overlook ways to tap into those who complete non-resident programs.

Dynamic Force Employment: A Vital Tool in Winning Strategic Global Competitions

Dynamic Force Employment: A Vital Tool in Winning Strategic Global Competitions

Dynamic force employment presents an opportunity to fundamentally change the way the U.S. military allocates forces to respond to crises, and proactively take advantage of global strategic opportunities. Rapid and variable deployment of ready forces can deter conflict and foment confusion and paralysis in adversaries, making it a powerful tool to be wielded in global competitions with China, Russia, and others.

#Reviewing 21st Century Power: Strategic Superiority for the Modern Era

#Reviewing 21st Century Power: Strategic Superiority for the Modern Era

The adversaries of today are still human, and the threats of today may not be so conceptually different from those of the Cold War. By looking back at how a previous generation of strategists considered and communicated their strategic challenges in context, we may be able to gain insights into how to address these modern threats. 21st Century Power: Strategic Superiority for the Modern Era is a useful resource toward that end.

Cybersecurity as Attack-Defense: What the French Election Taught Us About Fighting Back

Cybersecurity as Attack-Defense: What the French Election Taught Us About Fighting Back

A successful cyber doctrine must epitomize Clausewitz’s argument in favor of an active or attack-based defense, found in a relatively unknown but rich section of On War entitled “Methods of Resistance.” The chapter opens with a compelling reminder that the advantage of the defense is its defining purpose is to ward off an attack, and this warding off has as its principal strength the idea of awaiting.

Managing World War: The Army Service Forces and General Somervell’s Rules for Getting Things Done

Managing World War: The Army Service Forces and General Somervell’s Rules for Getting Things Done

The activities of the Army Service Forces rarely garner attention in ongoing debates about warfare. Perhaps this is because modern conflict, unlike World War II, does not rely on massive firepower and highly centralized command structures. However, the management rules conceived by General Brehon Somervell are no less relevant and applicable to today’s military procurement and logistical challenges than they were over 75 years ago.

#Reviewing Us vs. Them: The Failures of Globalism

#Reviewing Us vs. Them: The Failures of Globalism

For many years, the world hummed a sweet, optimistic tune about the benefits of globalization. Pundits like the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman noted the cascading advantages of an increasingly interconnected world with little appreciation for its uneven benefits. Despite living in a world evermore interwoven, the growing divides between globalization’s winners and losers are expanding. These so-called losers are becoming more vocal. They’re asking, “What about us? What about all the plans that ended in disaster?”

Southeast Asia is Pivotal, and U.S. Strategy Should Aim to Keep it That Way

Southeast Asia is Pivotal, and U.S. Strategy Should Aim to Keep it That Way

Southeast Asia has long been a region in policy limbo with shifting goals. Strategists who write off the region as destined to fall under a Chinese sphere of influence or, blind to history, attempt to force Southeast Asian countries to choose between the United States and China miss the mark.

Arming Ukraine: Practicalities and Implications

Arming Ukraine: Practicalities and Implications

Amid the fraught U.S.-Russia relations of late, it is vital for American policymakers to consider each geopolitical decision with the utmost care, ensuring the best interests of the United States and her allies are always kept in mind. An appropriate policy would include forgoing any further sale of lethal weaponry, replacing it instead with increased funds and non-lethal aid.

#Reviewing Always at War

#Reviewing Always at War

Deaile weaves a rich tapestry that incorporates doctrine, technology, and daily life in a way that previous authors in this crowded field have not fully explored. He has crafted one of the best single-volume treatments of SAC and its culture, and it should be required reading for anyone studying either Air Force history or Cold War military issues.

#Reviewing The Fate of Rome

#Reviewing The Fate of Rome

Professor Harper has produced a wonderful case study that demands a general rethinking of how we view the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. It turns much of the earlier views on Rome’s decline into surface explanations and places the chance happenings of nature in a driver’s seat that we can barely comprehend. It should also give us pause in how we think about the future.

Welcome to the Disinformation Game—You’re Late

Welcome to the Disinformation Game—You’re Late

Although the vehicle of social media has certainly increased the speed by which disinformation reaches its recipients, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to sow internal division among his adversaries is in no way a novel undertaking, and western leaders should be hesitant to paint Russian propaganda as an earth-shaking revelation in the 21st century. This isn’t a reinvention of Russia’s unconventional warfare paradigm; it’s a continuation of it.

Strategic Thought and the Military Officer

Strategic Thought and the Military Officer

In its complexity of ways, means, and ends, strategy is more than just another level of war. Perhaps this is why the record of strategy is so marked by error and failure. Failure in war is most often a failure of strategy. For the officer, this means all the effort, sacrifice, and success at the tactical and operational levels may well come to naught because of a flawed strategy.

Science Fiction and the Strategist 2.0

Science Fiction and the Strategist 2.0

Reading science fiction nurtures hope that there is a better future. While conflict, catastrophe, and climate change feature in many of these novels and movies, much science fiction is highly optimistic in nature…However, reading science fiction also allows us to consider a variety of negative potential futures…it is the first step in ensuring that they do not come to pass.

Information, Interdependence, and Friction in Strategy

Information, Interdependence, and Friction in Strategy

Information has a critical place in warfare. It is at once the source of both intelligence and the fog of war. Information is a nebulous infinite set from which we draw our frameworks, biases, and facts. The growing surfeit of data has led to proclamations that “data is the new oil” and even the idea that the information extracted from this data constitutes a kind of currency. At the tactical level, the intelligence born out of information preparation certainly constitutes a means of transacting operations. Yet beyond the battlefield, and into the realm of grand strategy, the utility of information can be uncertain.

Great Strategic Rivalries: The Return of Geopolitics

Great Strategic Rivalries: The Return of Geopolitics

One cannot go far wrong by employing Thucydides as a foundation for any model, as General George Marshall reminded us. But Marshall surely did not mean for policymakers to end their studies with the Peloponnesian War. Rather, Thucydides is but a starting point for a much wider historical study aimed at revealing the true nature of strategic rivalries and the character of their ensuing conflicts.

Corbett’s Relevance to the Modern Strategic Thinker

Corbett’s Relevance to the Modern Strategic Thinker

Although some have asked for renewed interpretation and analysis of the meaning of sea power, maritime strategy, and naval power, they have often ignored that this has often revisited challenges and questions that have been raised before. Many of these questions Corbett, American naval thinker Alfred Mahan, and the founding father of the scientific study of naval history, Prof John Laughton, have tackled repeatedly in the past.