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.
In great power competition, alliances matter as much as anything else. And, as previous great power competitions demonstrate, alliance shifts can lead to instability and even open conflict between competitors. For the United States to maintain the upper hand in a worldwide strategic competition with China, alliances play a central role.
Looking back to the Cold War, most analyses, including American intelligence estimates, underappreciated the systemic weakness of the Soviet Union before the precipitous fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Currently, many over-appreciate systemic weaknesses in China linked to demographic decline, debt, and large migrant populations, among other issues, as signs of distress. Today, strategic analyses miss a possible leadership transition in China or gloss over the domestic fissures in American society. Therefore, it is critically important, now more than ever, to question conventional strategic assumptions and logic. Otherwise, the U.S. will be caught by surprise and face utter disappointment with its China policy once again in the not-too-distant future.
As the Biden administration settles into office it faces a number of monumental tasks - dealing with the ongoing global health pandemic, repairing alliances, and preparing the country for the coming great power competition with China, just to name a few. This poses the question regarding which issues in particular should inform the rewriting of the next National Security Strategy. While a number of pressing foreign and security policy issues are high on the agenda, the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy should also make reference to and lay the framework for an active cruise missile counterproliferation and arms control strategy.
President Biden’s Africa team will face three dilemmas that would be recognizable to any American statesman responsible for Africa policy in the post 1945 period. The answers to these three foundational questions, set out in key strategic documents like the National Security Strategy, provide the intellectual framework that foreshadows subsequent resource allocations and shapes the policies through which the United States engages the African continent.
Following the overwhelming response to our 1st quarterly series on the next National Security Strategy, The Strategy Bridge is shifting gears. Our 2nd quarter series is all about assumptions in policy, strategy, and military strategy. What problematic or powerful assumption(s) should The Strategy Bridge readers contemplate and why?
To guide its National Security Strategy’s technology priorities, the Biden Administration should turn to analytic methods that rely less on predictions of future scenarios and capabilities. Instead, they should use the net assessment methodology pioneered by Andrew Marshall and others during the Cold War. Although there is no fixed methodology to conduct a net assessment, in general it evaluates trends in each competitor’s strategy, doctrine, and capabilities a decade or more in the past and future to identify asymmetries.
As the United States faces another dramatic shift in the character of its strategic competition with states like Russia and China, it should include in the next National Security Strategy proposals for the expansion, synchronization, and further centralization of U.S. national security organizations’ prerogatives, authorities, and decision-making.
The next National Security Strategy must make operational integration a priority. Such integration would provide the requisite foundation for driving the organizational reforms necessary to revamp doctrine, enhance the planning and execution of operations, and the conception and development of systems and platforms to best achieve U.S. strategic goals. This is not to argue for abolishing America’s traditional armed services but rather to reduce their distorting focus on the tactical level of war. It is time to recognize that twenty-first-century conditions require that strategic and operational capabilities need to be developed and utilized by women and men whose training, background, and education are not tied to the services' parochial imperatives.
Questions are our best friends for the invention and refinement of strong useful theory, and they are the lethal enemies of poor theory. So suggests Colin Gray. These questions then undergird and shape strategic thinking. What theoretical and empirical question should most inform the rewriting of the U.S. National Security Strategy? This quarter’s series seeks compelling arguments to inform the senior leaders responsible for authoring the next U.S. National Security Strategy.
In Korea: The War Before Vietnam, Callum A. MacDonald writes with short, sharp clarity. The precision of his writing does not take away from necessary details or the importance of the Korean War in international history, especially for those involved in that conflict. The book is driven by a narrative told through official documents, robust secondary sources, and scholarship developed over nearly 35 years.
Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove: The Secret History of Nuclear War Films is a fresh study that attempts to answer these intriguing questions. Through a close reading of a cluster of “Cold War nuclear crisis films,” which is described as “a staple of the Cold War popular cultural milieu from the 1950s to the 1980s,” this clearly written and thought-provoking book explores how these screen narratives depicted the nuclear weapons apparatus and strategic decision-making.
The 50 stories in Atlas at War range from 1951 to 1960, curated by comics history author Michael Vassallo, who has previously written on the history of Marvel Comics. Most of the stories are about the Korean War and World War II, although there are a few stories about other conflicts. Readers will be interested to see early, non-superhero, work by famed creators such as Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko, who defined the early periods of Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. A vast array of other, lesser-known to today’s readers, talents contribute fascinating work as well. However, while this collection of early war comics will please older readers who might nostalgically remember these types of stories from their youth, and provide fascinating historiographical insight into how popular culture contributed to the culturally constructed memory of these wars, the work could probably benefit from more contextualization, analysis, and commentary.
Despite the increasing popularity of wargaming, academic and professional sources are still scarce. The newest book on wargaming is published by the Naval Institute Press and features a robust description of wargaming as implemented by the United States Naval Postgraduate School . It explains the different purposes of wargaming with the main focus on analytic wargames.
This book is divided into three types of capacity building campaigns in roughly chronological order through eight U.S. interventions. The first section covers the efforts of the United States during the Cold War in Colombia, Grenada, and El Salvador. In using these examples, Mines identifies a number of conditions necessary for international interventions to succeed. First, governance will not take root without the support of the host nation and a functioning political agreement. Next, nation-building is a whole-of-government exercise and requires attention and resources equal to, if not greater, than in times of war. Finally, nation-building must include representation from all members and sections of the host population. Mines returns to these first hard lessons learned at the conclusion of his book and re-emphasizes the simple conditions requisite for successful nation-building.
Azzam’s legacy is a complicated one. It is difficult to pin down the exact extent of his influence and where others have distorted his ideas. Moreover, even though Azzam was critical of the previous era of transnational hijacking and terrorism, he ultimately became the inspiration for a subsequent, more violent movement, one that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Muslims, most of them at the hands of other Muslims. But as complex as Azzam’s legacy in the evolution of global jihad has been, Thomas Hegghammer’s masterful book will certainly contribute to our growing, collective understanding of his important role.
This book has many strengths. The style is concise, and the main concepts are understandable, focusing on important state and non-state actor related issues. Each chapter ends with a summary, critical thinking questions for students and readers, as well as a detailed bibliography and notes section. Possible weaknesses derive, on the other hand, from a low level of granularity offered in the text when it comes to the illustration of some specific techniques such as structured analysis technique that could help intelligence professionals to refine their level of analysis.
This book responds to the recent upswing in interest in Thucydides in international relations and public circles, and seeks to get international relations scholars more engaged in the nuances of Thucydides. It presents common assumptions made from Thucydides’ text, demonstrates how the reality of the situation in Thucydides’ text and in Greece at the time was more complicated, and gives readers some take-aways to consider when contemplating how to apply the lessons of Thucydides. Speaking directly to international relations scholarship and theory in a way that few classical scholars would, the work is good for those who want a book that addresses the specific ways in which international relations scholars and the media interpret Thucydides. However, the work's simplifications and omissions impair its overall impact.
