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 generation living in the aftermath of World War II understood the value of these structures intrinsically. The most effective and efficient way to protect the American homeland and the economy was through global engagement and forward defense. Today, the barriers between nations and empowered subnational actors continue to shrink in the midst of a peacetime international system that is increasingly dominated by competition and coercion between great powers.
Surprise needs to be a core part of training, planning, doctrine, and strategy, particularly the ability to adapt to situations as they are. Even then, no military has ever consistently overcome the problem of battlefield surprise, meaning that it will remain an ongoing challenge and opportunity. Napoleon’s opening observation that avoiding surprise requires constant mental vigilance echoes earlier Roman and Byzantine military guidance.
Strategy formulation within the United States is a difficult and messy process that can differ substantially from administration to administration. The president’s flexibility within the National Security Council system enables frequent changes to its process and influence as the nation’s primary strategy-making device. This variance, in turn, makes it difficult to ensure long-term, inter-administration strategic consistency. Furthermore, even within individual administrations, strategy is not the result of a monolithic policy machine, but of multiple sub-optimized positions informed by a variety of security perspectives and moderated by organizational equities.
To maintain national survival a state must develop strategies that avoid cumulative change to the point of extinction or speciation. Essential to this feat, national adaptedness recognizes not only the infinite potential of the state, but the importance of resiliency or fitness within a constant state of change. Past controversy notwithstanding, biological metaphors have served for millennia as effective comparative devices. Modified contextually to fit within international relations, modern biological evolutionary theory and ecology offer an objective theory of change that supports a systemic and holistic grasp of problem framing and strategy.
Of the many shortcomings of American strategy in Afghanistan, the trials and tribulations of Afghan police development represent a crucial, but often overlooked, piece of the narrative. When contextualized alongside monumental challenges and rare glimmers of hope, the legacy of Afghan policing also imparts lessons relevant, not just for the future of Afghanistan, but state-building and stabilization efforts the world over.
Warriors fight in ceaseless bouts of mental combat to win in conflicts involving competing wills. These fights occur in multiple domains, against clever adversaries using asymmetric means, including information and cognition at several levels. This position argues for acceptance of a thought—the right people and organizations must purposefully invest in improving the education of our best and brightest to raise these young and old minds to a high-level of thought.
A realist calculus of transactional security fails to take account of the moral reality of war. It results in unjust war and moral injury to those who engage in war. It tarnishes the state’s way of war by reducing groups of persons into means rather than recognizing their proper dignity as ends in themselves. Strategists working today must formulate the common good among those political communities that agree to partnership in war. At a minimum, this must include the analogy of political communities as persons who retain inherent human dignity as ends in themselves. It must also include the deliberate effort to formulate a positive good that is not narrowly the destruction of an enemy but is a basis of trust leading to a mutual, better peace.
There is an inviting quality to plain-spoken wisdom. We see it these days in succinct and quippy memes and social media posts that distill for us complex personal, national, and global challenges in 280 characters or less. Yet, as satisfying as it may be to blindly accept uncomplicated truths, one of the great dangers in having our biases confirmed is that we stop asking questions of a complicated world, which is how we actually learn, grow, and come to meaningful solutions to problems both simple and complex.
Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech is popularly understood to have improved the United States’ standing among Arab nations. His words offered hope for a better political future in the new world order. Wilson’s rhetoric, however, ultimately proved detrimental to the Arab view of the United States. By raising Arab expectations for national sovereignty Wilson’s Fourteen Points invited a moral taint on the U.S. in the eyes of Arab nationalists. This taint exacerbated the strain on U.S.-Arab relations that would follow the creation of the Israeli state.
Within the international system, the importance of structure is not monopolized at the systemic level, but also heavily predicated on how individual states configure and order their nations and the benefits and detriments these structures endow. One of the most important state level structures is regime type. Applied simplistically, examining state structures based on regime type divides the world into a binary construct of democracies and autocracies.
Clausewitz’s concepts of grammar and logic have stood the test of time. His dictum that war is indeed “the continuation of policy by other means” holds true today, and while the character of war has evolved, the higher logic and the influence of policy has remained a constant. This article will first address some key definitions, before exploring the concept of logic and grammar as introduced in On War and as they relate to his own experiences. These concepts will then be explored through the prisms of two contrasting case studies: industrialised warfare on the Western Front during the First World War, and the new logic of war in the face of the unprecedented existential threat of the Nuclear Age.
The U.S. military has already begun to incorporate artificial intelligence into its operations. However, the use of autonomous machines in the U.S. could be said to be quite conservative in comparison to its adversaries. Although artificial intelligence assists in providing risk predictions and improving time available to react to events, some believe artificial intelligence and autonomous systems will drastically distance humans from a direct combat role. Observations regarding the complexity of warfare, regardless of the technology, force scientists and military leaders to question the potential consequences of implementing artificial intelligence and autonomous systems in the next military conflict.
Producing new fighter pilots is not an overnight proposition. Increasing the capacity of production pipelines is a costly and long-term endeavor; as a result, the Air Force has proposed short-term capacity gains by operating the fighter pilot training systems at surge tempo and shortening time in the pipeline through syllabus reductions. Correspondingly, an oversupply of new fighter graduates with less-developed airmanship skills transfers risk to front-line units. Recent incidents within the U.S. Navy’s surface fleet offer a cautionary tale of unacknowledged systemic risks. What can the Air Force learn from the fleet as it attempts to reverse the downward flightpath of the fighter pilot force structure, modernize for peer competition, and continue armed-overwatch in U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility?
The 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) serves as the keystone document of America’s strategic posture. Considering how the world has changed since it was first published, and in response to how our adversaries have reacted to U.S. actions on the world stage, the next National Security Strategy must shift to meet evolving threats. The next National Security Strategy must remain grounded in principled realism, but also must pivot away from the insular tone that has isolated the U.S. from its friends and has needlessly provoked its enemies. America must engage with the world and shift from a policy maintaining peace through strength of arms to a posture of peace through strength of engagement.
Over the last decade, as grand strategy has become all the rage in international relations, foreign policy and security scholars have also started criticizing the concept in the common understanding in their field. Whereas this literature seems content with grand strategy’s transition from its original martial dimension to statecraft, it shows impatience with its lack of practicality in the realm of government. These political scientists’ concerns with the impracticality of the concept match some strategy scholars’ disinclination to accept grand strategy into the corpus of strategic theory. The dominant view in the latter discipline is that strategy’s raison d’être is pragmatic as it serves the conduct of war or statecraft. It is thus no surprise that, in its most visionary conceptualizations, grand strategy met the resistance of some strategists.
For today’s naval professionals and scholars aspiring to follow Sim’s advice on strategic studies, A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy offers an ideal starting point. Concise and well-researched, this highly readable volume will no doubt persuade many readers, most especially young naval professionals, to dig more deeply into studies of history and strategy.
The common perception that China’s centralized state leadership is empowered to pursue Chinese dominance over international affairs is tempting, but illusory. Its actions abroad are better understood as a manifestation of the Chinese leadership’s responses to various, and occasionally conflicting, domestic political, economic, and social pressures.
The United States should once again place greater emphasis on a concept known as soft power as a means to influence Russian perceptions towards a more pro-Western Democratic mindset. If the United States can successfully influence Russian perceptions through soft power, one might see a less corrupt and more democratic Russia, and perhaps a peaceful transition of power in the post-Putin future.
The following interview is a collaboration between Dr. Lori Lyn Bogle and two of her students, Midshipman Lucas Almas and Midshipman Jacob Kinnear, and historian Scott Mobley from the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Dr. Mobley’s recent groundbreaking book, Progressives in Navy Blue: Maritime Strategy, American Empire, and the Transformation of U.S. Naval Identity, 1873-1898 is of special interest to current midshipmen at the United States Naval Academy and illuminates the complicated cultural shift in the officer corps as the service transformed from sail to steam following the Civil War that persists to this day.
