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.
A foundational pillar of Middle Eastern regional stability centers on the relationship between Iran and the Arab-Israeli coalition. Establishing a regional security architecture centered on a balance of power is crucial to American interests in ensuring uninhibited movement of trade and energy resources. But the current American strategy of diplomatic disengagement coupled with unabated conventional arms buildup of Gulf Arab partners only serves to exacerbate regional tensions.
Ethiopia provides a unique opportunity to strengthen and encourage regional institutions to act as arbiters in parallel with U.S. aims and strategic interests. Ultimately, a regional approach gives policymakers greater global flexibility to respond to the persistent challenges threatening U.S. interests in Africa while avoiding the pitfalls of unilateral engagement.
Fiction is a great way to explore the possibilities and risks of AI. Done right, fiction serves as a way to guide the decisions that we make. Unfortunately, many portrayals of AI in fiction focus too far into the future, sometimes imputing capabilities that are unlikely to ever exist, and consequently fail to engage with the challenges that we face in the near future. Better examples address issues that we are going to face soon. Understanding which fiction fits which description helps us to adjust our understanding accordingly.
The U.S. is unprepared for a future of human-centric warfare. Its military doctrine acknowledges morale and other psychological factors but does not provide guidance on how to shape it. This represents a disconnect between war as a material affair and war as a human affair. Such a misconception of warfare leaves the U.S. and its allies vulnerable to adversaries and enemies seeking to exploit this lacuna. The U.S. therefore critically constrains itself despite its material strengths if it fails to embrace a psychologically grounded view of war.
The West should engage these texts not only to better understand China, but also ourselves. The continuous strife and uncertainty of the Warring States period propelled the great thinkers of that age to develop far reaching analyses of fundamental issues facing societies of all eras and cultures. Those writers sparked debates that deal with universal issues about human nature, governance, and warfare…None of this means that Eastern thinking should replace Western thought in our own professional military education institutions, but being able to identify, contrast, and synthesize alternate viewpoints remains vital to strategic success.
Each and every day, dedicated national security professionals devote themselves to preparing for future events—the defense of allies and partners, response to cyber attacks on infrastructure and critical networks, humanitarian crises, etc. As Donald Rumsfeld once opined, these are the “known knowns. For the second quarterly series of 2022 on The Strategy Bridge, we asked our contributors to ponder the equally important “unknown unknowns” and, insofar as this is possible, to characterize potential U.S. national security weaknesses and the threats most likely to blindside the U.S. and its allies…to make them “known unknowns,” as it were.
Captain Ward Schrantz has written a detailed account of his personal experiences during a 22-month deployment covering his mobilization in the United States, his combat involvement on The Western Front, and his demobilization back to the United States during the First World War. Schrantz’s account was executed with minute details that highlight the sacrifices and hardships endured by the soldiers of Company A, and a general reader with limited knowledge of the 35th Infantry Division’s role in the First World War may not benefit as much from the elaborate detail left by Schrantz or the archival work added by Patrick. But this is ultimately a book about one soldier before, during, and after the First World War.
Innes’ work is an important starting place for any scholar or practitioner seeking to understand the significance of sanctuary as a guiding concept as well as the evolution of Cold War thinking through the era of globalization and the U.S. Global War on Terror. His book is a superb example of blending real world experience with in-depth research and analysis. Its insightful examination of the shifting definitions and uses of the concept of sanctuary offers important cautions for the present as it reveals the blind spots of the past.
Culture and, more specifically, human terrain has not gone away with the returned focus on strategic competition. Drohan’s work highlights the tensions between moral and immoral and legal and illegal ways of seeking to defeat insurgencies as well as how governments shape and disseminate narratives that will be equally important in more conventional conflicts of the future. From winning hearts and minds to large-scale combat operations themselves, morality—indeed the whole expanse of human terrain—is just as important as lethality, not only to strategic narratives but to strategy itself.
The KCME Military Ethics Education Playing Cards Deck is an exceptionally versatile tool that has great utility for both individual reflection and organizational-level ethics education. It should become part of professional military ethics education toolkits across the U.S. Armed Forces and its allies and partners. As more military practitioners use the Deck, they should contribute their own stories and perspectives to KCME to make the tool even better.
The continent-wide desolation of the First World War left its impact on the philosophical landscape of Europe. We cannot yet know what effects the Global War on Terror will have on the philosophy of the future. The philosophical problems and solutions will certainly be different, but the reality of war experiences, although varied, will no doubt precipitate new attempts at unraveling the mysteries of human lived experience. We must give attention to this influence and the diverse ways it may manifest itself in the lives of those both directly and indirectly affected by war…Eilenberger’s able account is necessary reading, for its creativity, its depth of philosophical understanding, and its exploration of the “decade that reinvented philosophy,” whose insights have significant resonances and cautions for our own time.
The contributions in the text are easy to follow and highly interesting to read. The book is also very timely. It contributes a wide range of interesting material to ongoing debates about the future of war, the place of hybrid or grey operations as well as reminding us about the role of narratives, myth, and belief in shaping our understandings of what constitutes a win.
In Mars Adapting, Frank Hoffman studies bottom-up adaptation through the lens of organizational learning theory to explain its dynamics. This theory states that business organizations must continuously evaluate their performance in a competitive and shifting environment to prosper and even survive. Hoffman states that this notion applies to militaries during wartime as they seek to gain an advantage over their adversaries.
Wright’s “Africa in Global Society,” despite being twenty years old, contains a set of timeless lenses for viewing Africa in the contemporary era: Regionality, Continentality, New Issue solutions, and Democracy. When analyzed through this four-pillared framework, strategic and political engagement strategies may be more coherently framed and contextualized to facilitate the elusive whole-of-government approach.
In The Arab Bulletin, the origins of many of the region’s current instabilities can be found in the reports about restive tribes, dynasties, and leaders. Even today, the content, methodology, analysis, and writing style of the Arab Bulletin are relevant. In essence the Bulletin is a fourteen volume master class in the use of intelligence and hybrid warfare in immediate and long term strategy. T.E. Lawrence was the only officer who wrote comprehensively about his work with the Arab Bureau, and some of his work is suspect.
Telling the story of forever wars requires a long cast list. It is a lot of story—maybe even a forever story—not only because it must communicate an overwhelming amount of information about an event that has not yet ended, but also because it is the story about ourselves that Americans must compulsively return to, retelling it again and again in an effort to make sense of the imbroglio that has defined the United States for the last twenty years.
A mighty military with a global reach and a warrior tradition bogged down in the complexities of war waged in dispersed battlegrounds upon another continent. A fearsome host unable to achieve its goals despite outclassing the training, discipline, equipment, and resources of its foes. National leaders with every confidence in victory reinforced by a continuing stream of misleading and optimistic reports. Although evocative of a more contemporary conflict and military, war historian Rick Atkinson’s latest work is about the bloody birth of America and masterfully exposes the Revolutionary War in all its confusion, complexity, and discord.
Written in the style of an engaging spy thriller, the story takes the reader through a series of events involving real individuals with capabilities and intentions to harm others. The plot in a nutshell: a handful of individuals inspired–and in some cases trained–by al-Qaeda attempted to smuggle liquid explosives on board U.S.-bound transatlantic flights. If successful, they would have destroyed multiple aircraft, murdered thousands of people, and increased public fear worldwide about aviation travel. The economic toll could have been comparable to that of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In the end, the most impactful thing these plotters did was provoke a change in aviation security wherein passengers can no longer bring over three ounces of liquids through the airport security checkpoints. This is a story, certainly a compelling one, about the failure of a terrorist plot.
Just and Unjust Uses of Limited Force by Daniel Brunstetter offers an insightful look into the permissions and limits of international force short of war. Brunstetter proposes a theory of justice for limited force (or vim in Latin). The need for such a study is indicated by the fact that most of the terminology used to describe morality in war does not adequately capture contemporary uses of force, which warrants additional vocabulary. This is what Brunstetter provides. Full of contemporary examples and counterfactuals, Brunstetter's work offers a relevant heuristic to aid in understanding the fights of today.
