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.
COVID-19 is an understated watershed moment in U.S. national security, whereby a naturally-occurring virus has thrown individual citizens and the highest levels of leadership into disarray. The COVID-19 pandemic is driving perceptions of U.S. susceptibility to immensely disruptive biological threats and increases the likelihood of an artificial attack. This monumental shift in threat perception creates appealing circumstances for U.S. adversaries to experiment with emergent biotechnology.
Though the death toll from COVID-19 does not seem to be as calamitous as the historical epidemics referenced here, it may influence many actors in similarly profound ways. The economic damage will affect the ability of states to project power and support armed proxy groups. But domestic pressure and new internal rivalries that emerge from the pandemic could cause some belligerents to embark on risky military endeavors in the short term.
Hammes provides a current long-look ahead with respect to the unfolding fourth industrial revolution and the dramatic and ubiquitous changes it will bring. Published as part of the Cambria Rapid Communications in Conflict and Security series, this work clearly meets the editor’s goal of “providing policy makers, practitioners, analysts, and academics with in-depth analysis of fast-moving topics that require urgent yet informed debate.” Moreover, Hammes brings together the fields of international political economy and security studies in a way that makes important contributions to both areas.
Amidst the COVID-19 crisis, trust in institutions and leadership face a unique vulnerability that foreign actors are poised to exploit. This article describes a unique nexus of institutional confidence and societal vulnerability to foreign disinformation, the prevalent tactics used to leverage the American information ecosystem, and ways the U.S. military can better support the society it is charged to defend.
When a wildfire tears through a forest, attention immediately focuses on the negative—how many acres burned, the impact on the environment, and above all the tragic loss of life. What rarely goes noted, however, is the critical benefit wildfires provide. In many respects, wildfires are the most effective way for many ecosystems to rid themselves of the overgrowth that strangles out and prevents new plant life from thriving. If the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a wildfire, the Department of Defense's bureaucracy is the forest.
Strategy is about making a whole series of choices about one’s goals, priorities, resources, and risk tolerance. Strategy involves choices that respond to others’ actions and to changes in the environment. Sometimes all of the available choices will be less than optimal. Almost never is there a single perfect solution to a given problem—strategic choices require tradeoffs. Overwhelmingly, though, strategic aims and choices are framed in terms of winning and losing; this tendency, however, reflects poor strategic thinking and leads to false choices about what can and should and must be done. The language of strategy requires more options, more nuance, and better metaphors.
Alanbrooke’s six years at the apex of the British military, at a time when the nation faced its greatest crisis of modern history, tells a story of the inherent value of deep professional competence, a willingness to register dissent, and a commitment to an ideal greater than any single organization or individual. Alanbrooke proved the criticality of remaining unruffled by those things outside of his control, yet demanding the very best from those within his domain.
The novel coronavirus pandemic has built the foundation for an unexpected pax epidemica between the U.S. and China. The pandemic has inflicted significant damages on all the great and middle powers to the extent that none would be in a position to win a war anytime in the near future. Most importantly, policymakers’ pessimistic considerations about their own country’s military capabilities and readiness for war would make them risk-averse and unwilling to undertake any major military campaign, therefore calling off the risk of interstate war altogether.
Increasing access to space means that low Earth orbit will soon be America’s front door. Proliferating adversary satellites—many capable of kinetic and non-kinetic actions—will prowl less than 100 miles away from U.S. cities, much as Russian submarines patrol the U.S. coast today. The U.S. should be there first, and in force, ensuring that China and Russia will struggle to keep pace in light of overwhelming U.S. economic, military, and strategic advantages in orbit.
Although it has been over five years since the Ebola crisis devastated West Africa and energized the global community to more effectively prevent, detect, and respond to health threats, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed America’s lack of preparedness for high-consequence disease outbreaks. While America’s Global Health Security Strategy is an important framework to strengthen global health security, as written, the strategy is insufficient.
Though he was a known quantity to all Kremlinologists and highly respected, however, Thompson has largely remained an obscure figure. The online U.S. State Department history of the career foreign service officer Llewellyn Thompson is terse, indicating his service in Austria (1952-1957), the Soviet Union (1957-1962, 1966-1969), and “at large” (1962-1966). Omitted from this thumbnail sketch is Thompson’s service prior to and during World War II. Moreover, the official outline mentions nothing of the Cold War narrative involving the postwar negotiations pertaining to Trieste, the Berlin Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, or the negotiations paving the way for the first Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT I). Seldom has a person been so in the thick of important events only to be so largely forgotten.
Faced with staggering levels of global hunger, the transportation, aid, and military communities need to evaluate the best use of a limited budget. It should not continue funding largely obsolete ships. Instead, it should be used to feed the hungry and use soft power to diffuse conflict before it occurs. Of course, policy is not limited to black and white binaries, and amending aid disbursement procedures will not come without some negative ramifications. However, eliminating cargo preference will almost invariably do more good than harm. Lives saved, people fed, and conflict assuaged, at little cost to maritime security.
When leaders re-examine their professional development programs, expanding these programs to include the visual and fine arts presents unique options. Like professional reading lists, the fine arts offer opportunities to explore both the history and societal views of war from an overlooked perspective, the perspective of artists. Artistic interpretation of events allows viewers to glimpse a society at a moment in time as well as an enduring perspective of a larger conflict, much like Picasso’s epic mural was an interpretation of both Franco’s dictatorship and the discrete attack on the town of Guernica.
Technology adds speed and efficiency to work environments, but also complexity as workers of all types integrate disparate software applications and datasets, requiring them to use higher cognitive skills to do their jobs effectively. COVID-19 has only emphasized this point—our ability to respond to modern-day crises increasingly depends on the digital capabilities organizations possess. The current crisis has taught people to communicate, team, learn and overcome challenges differently in the Digital Age. As such, troops at all levels have new opportunities to solve complex problems, redesign workflows, and scale solutions—if provided permission and expertise.
Sayle explains how most of NATO’s contemporary challenges are reminiscent of the Cold War. Americans always wanted allies to contribute more, and allies always refused. Competing national interests, an aggressive Russia, and tension between personalities are not new stories. During the Cold War, NATO’s survival was indeed due to the Soviet threat in great measure, but it was also due to the statesmanship of its leaders, including successive U.S. presidents who managed to overcome their disagreements with other NATO allies. Above all, what brought the allies together—liberal democratic values—is itself a threat to NATO due to the election of NATO-skeptic leaders, which the alliance’s leaders had feared in the past.
Ensure the ability to produce and deploy more military power than the enemy, protect this capability, and use the resulting military power to attack an adversary’s ability to do the same. Simple, but difficult. Technophiles will spill immeasurable amounts of ink writing of the need for American investment in artificial intelligence, hypersonics, and other new technology. The brutal truth is none of this technological overmatch matters if America can’t build enough of it, sustain it, or get it to the fight in the first place.
Commonly referred to as multi-domain operations, the concept embraces short war thinking and promotes a vision of war conditioned entirely on speed. According to the concept, U.S. Army formations operating as part of the joint force create or leverage effects at decisive spaces across multiple domains—land, maritime, air, space, cyberspace, and the information environment—to neutralize and dis-integrate enemy anti-access and area denial systems, enabling maneuver forces to isolate and defeat the enemy at echelon…Instead of rushing to battle, the U.S. Army would fare better by joining the fight later, after political leaders have reached consensus, a coalition has formed, and the nation has had time to mobilize the economy that brought it victory in previous big wars.
For generations of military historians, the Emmitsburg Road, the highway that runs from Emmitsburg in Maryland into southern Pennsylvania—and that, over the course of a single mile, bisects the Gettysburg battlefield—has served as a kind of festering gash in America’s historiographic landscape. The road’s importance is at the heart of Lee’s attack plan on the battle’s second day, when he directed Longstreet to use it as the geographic centerpiece of his assault. Longstreet, Lee said, was to attack “up the Emmitsburg Road.” The problem is that while Lee had an apparently clear vision of what he meant, at least some of his subordinates, and generations of historians, did not.
