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.
Unforgotten in the Gulf of Tonkin is an outstanding contribution that recounts and analyzes the growth and development of combat search and rescue. In telling that story, Bjorkman weaves in a rich and critically important discussion of larger ethical and moral issues associated with war. Her commendable work deserves a spot in the libraries of all military aviators and students of the profession of arms.
The Hardest Place is an incredibly well-written piece of non-fiction that blends aspects of both an action novel and a history lesson. Morgan puts a human face on both sides of the conflict in all its facets by continuously highlighting the individual stories of the women and men who served there. Military students of history, along with anyone interested in America’s longest war, would benefit from reading this excellent book. The military profession has a duty to learn from the conflict, and this book is an essential introduction to a small piece that represents much of the trouble with the broader whole.
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?
The Compleat Victory is a reminder that the hard-learned lessons of today’s conflicts are eerily like the lessons taught more than two centuries ago. Informal relationships outside of the chain of command still matter. The great captains of history have genius in planning as well as in execution, meaning high levels of grip as Weddle defines it. Finally, leaders and staffs must continually examine and evaluate their assumptions on the character or nature of the fight they are in.
Given the scarcity of authoritative writings or clarifying analyses on Sun Tzu’s text, how confident should we be that we have correctly grasped “the Way” of this ancient sage? Of particular importance, one of the core ideas we almost universally believe serves as a bedrock to Sun Tzu’s overall military philosophy—that his ideal strategic objective is “to take the enemy whole and intact”—rests on a problematic and potentially untenable textual foundation.
For a chewy policy book about a usually anodyne subject, pension reform, Archuleta’s Twenty Years of Service was an electrifying read. Published in 2020, two years after the Department of Defense implemented the first substantive change in its military retirement pension policy in seventy years, Twenty Years of Service asks, and deftly answers, two questions. First, why did the military’s pension system remain unchanged for so long when almost everything else about the military’s personnel policy had changed since World War II? Second, Archuleta asks why and how a change to the military pension system finally occurred as it did when President Obama signed the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act into law in November 2015.
Kosovo is a tantalizing case of success. Even today Kosovar Albanians speak favorably of America and NATO...Under certain circumstances, and with enough commitment, military intervention can work and save lives. But we need to look beyond the assumption that our decisions and actions determine success or failure, and instead make sure the dynamics of the local conflict are conducive to an intervention. Ultimately, not all problems can be solved with military force.
The buzzwordification of the term domain has long passed the point of diminishing returns, and nowhere is that a greater hazard than with cyber operations. It’s time to re-think cyber to reflect the realities of modern war, and with it the broader lexicon of what constitutes domains and layers of warfare.
All too often, national security policy professionals presume modern technology has obviated the importance of geographic location and physical features. Yet physical geography remains central to national security realities that will only become more severe as competition between great powers of relative parity intensifies.
Escalation control was once firmly part of the U.S. strategic lexicon. The term fell into disuse because it was assumed U.S. unipolarity made it dominant in any post-Cold War political-military competition. But such assumptions are clearly incorrect today. Indeed, U.S. responses to rival nations’ efforts to dominate escalation narratives have tended to telegraph timidity rather than strength.
Antarctica’s isolation may have set the stage for a hard pivot in global interest. Discarding these holdover assumptions will be important to recalibrate our understanding of the region’s strategic relevance. Without reform to the Antarctic Treaty system, and great powers assuming collective responsibility, Antarctica could even become a potential catalyst for outright conflict.
China cannot be an effective offshore balancer if it remains on the permanent defensive in its own neighborhood, hemmed in by American bases, naval forces, allies and security partners. To be in a position to balance the United States globally, it must not only break through the first island chain but achieve outright regional supremacy in the Western Pacific.
If the United States sees any value in attempting to build amicable relations with Russia in a post-Vladimir Putin future, it must set aside certain dangerous assumptions that have shaped and spearheaded U.S. strategic policy in the Post-Cold War unipolar world. America’s strategy for dealing with Russia is outdated. The dangerous assumption that practicing Cold War era brinkmanship and hardlining actions to counter Putin’s strongman strategy as an effective tool is outdated and only serves to strengthen his position.
Great Power Competition is a trendy concept that frames our current perception of international affairs. To understand Great Power Competition, we need to deconstruct it. The underlying claim here is that the Great Power Competition is a hollow, unhelpful, and potentially dangerous concept. The case against it is threefold.
Since the end of World War II, technological superiority has been the cornerstone of American military strategy. Over the past 80 years, the U.S. restrained the all-out world war conflict of the twentieth century with sufficient numbers, highly capable weaponry, and logistical agility to timely deliver force en masse. The success of this strategy has also shaped how China is challenging the existing U.S.-led world order. Violent confrontation while the U.S. maintains this technological advantage with a network of alliances would mean ruin. Instead, China seeks to win on a battlefield more discrete but as consequential to American interests: supply chains.
Historical analogies are vital tools to navigate the present and shape the future, particularly given humanity's general lack of clairvoyance. However, such analogies must be carefully chosen; overreliance on a particular historical episode can instill assumptions in the minds of strategists or students of strategy that too often go unexamined. Currently, the Cold War reigns as the dominant analogy in framing U.S.-China relations in the 21st century.
Neil C. Renic’s Asymmetric Killing is a thoughtful, if imperfect, assessment of the morality of riskless war. Within the skeptical academic discourse surrounding unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), authors either deflate the virtue of the men/women who employ such weapons, inflate the influence of technology on the operator or decision-maker, or conflate asymmetry and moral wrongness. Renic grapples, to some degree, with each of these aspects of the topic using a systematic, historical, and balanced method.
To realign and revise America’s grand strategic assumptions, the U.S. must first recognize that its image of the post-COVID world must shift. COVID-19, along with a polarized political and social climate and a recovering economy, has placed pressure on how the U.S. views and defines its core values. The reshaping of the nation and how it views its most fundamental values and beliefs will have profound impacts on how the nation formulates strategy, makes assumptions, and acts within the world.
Strategists contemplate great power politics by assuming that the previous century of American experience offers sufficient analogous historical examples while ignoring lessons that contradict that experience. The accepted set of assumptions about great power competition, as a result, rests on an anomalous period of world history during which ideology drove great power politics rather than calculated national interest. To challenge those assumptions, strategists must broaden the set of historical analogies from which they draw lessons for the twenty-first century.
This article draws from research in social psychology and sociolinguistics to argue that strategists would benefit from looking beyond the parts of the world that most make sense to Westerners. Getting out of English and engaging more intentionally with other cultures on their terms—including, if not especially, those hostile to the U.S.—should be the rule, not the exception, in strategic foresight and planning.
