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.
Thucydides offers many enduring insights for scholars and policymakers. New tensions emerge as great powers search for new allies and try to hold on to old ones. Once begun in earnest, great power competitions are likely to endure for decades, because of the resources great powers possess. Those resources make it highly likely conflict comes with an often terrible cost for the victor and for the vanquished.
While war between the United States and China is a possibility, a larger and more refined lesson could be gleaned from Thucydides’ ancient text. In an era of great power competition, The Peloponnesian War provides one of the first nearly complete histories of a conflict that included complex alliances, ideologically opposing views, civil discord, diplomacy, total war, and human struggle. It provides examples of how the choices made by Athenian and Spartan leaders mattered in determining whether they avoided war or led their countries into conflict. Most importantly, The Peloponnesian War offers strategists and policymakers invaluable insights into the nature and character of competition between two great powers and makes clear the importance of strategic options that avoid ill-conceived conflict.
America can still be a voice against oppression overseas even as it struggles to become a more perfect union at home. For people striving for freedom and justice abroad—from Zimbabwe to Hong Kong to Belarus—the broad movement for racial equality in America illustrates the aspirational and redemptive qualities that make America’s democracy so exceptional. One hopes that this struggle against structural racism, like the first Civil Rights Movement, will strengthen and inform the future of American statecraft.
The pillars of the trinity provide a foundation to understand how hybrid warfare employs irregular, unconventional, and conventional military power to balance against the risk of war trending towards absolute violence and open conflict. Consequently, hybrid warfare is an operational concept where military and non-military capabilities are optimised to distort reason, shape passion, and leverage chance to achieve strategic objectives and reduce the risk of escalation.
The U.S. government should nevertheless find a non-partisan, fact-based mechanism to determine what happened, capture lessons learned, and make recommendations regarding public health, the economy, and continuity of basic services. Regardless of how well or poorly the coronavirus was handled in this instance, an independent evaluation is necessary to better prepare the country for future pandemics. Moreover, the Department of Defense should review the 2018 National Defense Strategy to determine its relevance in a globally persistent novel coronavirus environment.
Earlier this year, The Strategy Bridge asked university and professional military education students to participate in our fourth annual student writing contest on the subject of strategy. The response was amazing. Now, we are pleased to announce the winners! We'll publish their essays, as well as some of the other submissions deserving an honorable mention, in a series in the very near future. We appreciate all the great submissions from the contest participants!
Cian O’Driscoll has written a thoughtful, erudite book that manages to insightfully explore both just war theory and the nature of war. Across seven pithy chapters plus an introduction and conclusion, O’Driscoll develops an extended argument about why the concept of victory in war is problematic for just war theory and how the integration of victory into just war theory can lead to a more realistic, though tragic, appraisal of just war theory. His conclusions should interest not only just war scholars, but also the broader community of war studies scholars and military practitioners.
Traditional military educational and training approaches often limit creative and critical thinking that can provide skills for quick decisions and action. Applying simple experiential learning tools in a collaborative physical setting can integrate both requirements, thus enhancing what students learn and can apply. Effectively, this requires applying Active Learning to professional military education, particularly for mid-career officers who have built up a body of practical field experience, but also are still young enough to be open cognitively to new ways of learning and thinking about their experiences.
For military institutions, social media is a mature tool that must move beyond the discretionary and into the realm of business as usual. In the absence of face-to-face interaction, social media is one of the most powerful ways for leaders to pass information, broadly convey intent, and for all of us to communicate, interact and foster professional sharing and discourse and build their capacity to influence.
Ambassador Herman Cohen is one of many career diplomats, along with ambassadors like John Campbell and David Shinn, who devote personal time to researching, understanding, and commenting on African affairs. Cohen’s most recent work traces U.S. foreign policy in Africa from Franklin Roosevelt to Donald Trump, intertwining historical files and personal insights to weave a picture of what the author titles, Eight Decades of Realpolitik.
Leo Blanken returns to the the Bridge to discuss the Weird and the Eerie. "The First World War was replete with the weird, due to the presence of things that did not seem to belong. Beyond the massive scaling up of firepower, several qualitatively new weapons were introduced that produced the unsettling effect of the weird."
Incorporating the centre of gravity with the indirect approach makes one’s actions more potent, providing an effective focal point that if successfully hit promises high yields for minimal costs. While like any other stratagem it will not always be possible to find the opportunity for both to be applied in conjunction with each other, perhaps because one lacks the options for manoeuvre or the centre of gravity is too well guarded, the yield is exponentially increased when a convergence exists.
Military historians and Marine Corps history buffs will gain much from reading How the Few Became the Proud. Short enough to be finished in several sittings, well-organized to allow for skipping around to focus on one’s individual interests, and useful as a scholarly reference tool for writers and researchers alike, this book will undoubtedly serve the military history community well.
Despite the multitude of domestic issues facing the United States as it approaches a presidential election, policymakers must also not lose sight of enduring foreign threats to the nation. Members of both political parties generally agree China constitutes the preeminent national security concern. How should the United States, in a post-COVID world, check Chinese global influence to best protect American national interests?
Grand strategy is now a Humpty Dumpty word for which many hold their own unique understanding.[1] This has arisen because many historians and international relations scholars simply create a definition for themselves when writing that fits the arguments they wish to make. They mainly use the term to buttress their opinions about specific historical cases and particular academic theories. They are not trying— nor, indeed, intending—to create a general, generic definition.
There are so many themes, plots, and subplots within this text that it is difficult to distill the work, but the main argument is that the U.S. Air Force incrementally developed an atomic air strategy from 1945 until the strategy fell apart after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kaplan’s narrative relies heavily on this event to sever the interconnected pieces of atomic strategy and air strategy once the popular imagination began to view atomic weapons as unusable.
China’s counter-intervention capability presents a tremendous impediment to continuous U.S. military operations within the Indo-Pacific. Its South China Sea claims, underpinned by weapons development and efforts across the non-military elements of national power, are intended to ensure China’s freedom of action. A free and open Indo-Pacific relies on further development and deployment of U.S. integrated air and missile defense systems and offers the means for hindering China’s counter-intervention strategy. These recommendations provide a realistic approach to compete with China in multiple domains and to ensure access in the event of a regional crisis.
This article is a call for professional military education to embrace a deeper, richer, and more thoughtful discussion on the phenomenon of creativity and its integration into curriculum. Indeed, we argue it is an essential ingredient in any equation that seeks to produce intellectual overmatch in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. The deliberate investment in creativity within professional military education is a meaningful step towards equipping the uniformed services to see beyond what the adversary can contemplate.
