Alessandra Nisch
Putin’s Wars: Testing Boyd’s Strategy of ...

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.

Putin’s Wars: Testing Boyd’s Strategy of Applied Friction

# Reviewing Intelligence and the State

# Reviewing Intelligence and the State

For a relatively short volume, Intelligence and the State manages to fill a range of gaps in the existing literature on the intelligence community. First and foremost, it provides a timely look at the issues confronting both policy makers and intelligence analysts that will only grow more relevant as technological advances increase the volume of raw information available to the intelligence community. Second, it offers the reader a condensed history of the European and American experiences with developing intelligence communities that would otherwise require combing through a range of academic literature. Finally, author Jonathan House leverages his decades of experience as a U.S. Army intelligence officer with valuable advice that can alleviate some of the pressures on the intelligence community and help the national security establishment avoid missing warning signs in the current environment.

#Reviewing Soldiers of End-Times: Assessing the Military Effectiveness of the Islamic State

#Reviewing Soldiers of End-Times: Assessing the Military Effectiveness of the Islamic State

Soldiers of End-Times: Assessing the Military Effectiveness of the Islamic State is a timely study of the effectiveness of the military tactics and strategy of the Islamic State (IS) from 2014 to 2019. Throughout his study, Levy examines how IS fought their form of an effective conventional war. In examining the effectiveness of IS military operations, Levy is one of the first to attempt to create a larger study on IS. Levy is restricted in his study by the novelty of his subject. The fall of IS is still very recent at the time of publication and many of the U.S. defense sources are still restricted to the general public.

#Reviewing Liberating Libya: British Diplomacy and War in the Desert

#Reviewing Liberating Libya: British Diplomacy and War in the Desert

Rupert Wieloch’s Liberating Libya: British Diplomacy and War in the Desert brings new insights to the story of British military and diplomatic involvement in Libya from the late seventeenth century to the present. The author draws mainly on a vast amount of secondary literature, supplemented with some primary material to tell the long story of British involvement in Libya. His compelling narrative is punctuated by numerous well-developed stories of personal action and sacrifice, and misfortune, which give it vivid depth and detail.

What Shapes Us: #Reviewing Forces

What Shapes Us: #Reviewing Forces

Throughout the collection, the invisible forces that shape the speaker in Stice’s collection move in mysterious and yet predictable ways. The result is a world rich in detail and meaning that is nevertheless captive to the churning rituals of an often faceless and capricious military bureaucracy. Stice captures both the tension and beauty of these unseen forces in poems that celebrate quiet domestic moments and gently interrogate the hardships created by the itinerant lifestyle of a military family.

#Reviewing The Wolves of Helmand

#Reviewing The Wolves of Helmand

Overall, Biggio conveys a great deal of information in a compact, highly-readable form. He touches lightly, but from the heart, on serious topics which makes this an accessible book for even the least militarily-savvy reader. An informed reader will appreciate the tale, while less-knowledgeable readers will enjoy gaining a broad understanding of the events without having to consult references.

That Grenade is a Heart: #Reviewing So Frag & So Bold

That Grenade is a Heart: #Reviewing So Frag & So Bold

The line between poems and jokes runs thin in Randy Brown’s new collection, So Frag and So Bold—but in the best possible way. Brown, in a series of mostly very-short poems, quips, and aphorisms, brings the gallows humor of military life to the stage in a unique, funny, and moving way all at once. These poems feel both very real and also imaginative, almost like a Greek chorus calling out in intervals from stage left, telling you the real thing you need to know.

#Reviewing Habits of Highly Effective Maritime Strategists

#Reviewing Habits of Highly Effective Maritime Strategists

Holmes argues the profession of arms requires habits of mind, heart, and deed that are compatible with, though distinct from, Covey’s principles. The thrust of Holmes’ book is elegant in its simplicity: aspirants and practitioners of military strategy alike should learn from the habits of history’s great strategists and understand how to emulate their behaviors in the present.

#Reviewing The Immigrant Superpower

#Reviewing The Immigrant Superpower

This book is relevant today as Americans constantly disagree on the impact of immigrants. It will also continue to remain relevant as immigrants will always be a point of contention for years to come. The United States may not be perfect, but Kane argues for immigrants making it better, not worse. Any American would benefit from reading this book and educating themselves on the impact immigrants have on the U.S. and why they contribute to making this country a true world superpower.

#REVIEWING Promising Young Woman

#REVIEWING Promising Young Woman

We need to be willing to push through the perception of oppression and subsequent defensiveness if we want to have any hope of creating a cultural system of respect and dignity, to combat and dismantle the firmly established and thriving cultural system that keeps women as unsafe as they are. Much of this work lies with us who like to consider ourselves clean-handed simply because we are not overt predators. We need to be in the arena and willing to fail embarrassingly in front of our peers, who will judge us, cast us out, and retaliate against us for violating their cultural system, the system built for us, and from which we benefit.

#Reviewing Her Cold War: Women in the US Military, 1945-1980

#Reviewing Her Cold War: Women in the US Military, 1945-1980

Her Cold War by Tanya Roth offers an insightful explanation of how, contrary to the popular narrative, Cold War era servicewomen were essentially the pioneers of the second wave feminist push for gender equality in the United States. The book focuses on the period between 1945 and 1980—a deceptively small window of time for such an impactful period both for women in the military and in U.S. culture more broadly. In 1945, there was no Department of Defense, separate Air Force, or a permanent place for women in any existing branch of the military. By 1980, only two generations later, the first groups of women were piloting military aircraft and graduating from military service academies.

Viewing Russia’s Actions Through the Lens of Imperialism: #Reviewing Leo Blanken’s Rational Empires

Viewing Russia’s Actions Through the Lens of Imperialism: #Reviewing Leo Blanken’s Rational Empires

The literature on international security for the last three decades has primarily focused on the twin problems of terrorism and insurgency as the principal threats to the global status quo, and in doing so has neglected the role of conquest as an instrument within great power competition. The emerging era of bare-knuckled territorial aggrandizement by revisionist great powers, therefore, has largely caught the academy underprepared. Given this, I offer a ten-year anniversary review of a book that could assist in shaping our understanding of the changing nature of the international system today.

Complex Support for a More Competitive Operational Environment

Complex Support for a More Competitive Operational Environment

With five themes and four classes of operations FM 3-0 is quite exhaustive, but still leaves unaddressed how limited intervention, peace operations, and irregular warfare operations should be conducted against competent, modernized adversaries. If the primary threat is not nonstate actors or insurgents without indirect fire or air capabilities, civil support and stability operations can no longer rely on permanent forward operating bases for logistical support and resupply. The elevation of support and stability to be operationally equal to offense and defense is a positive revision, but as written they are consumers rather than producers of security. A new, more complex support function in the operational spectrum is required.

Knowing the Knowable: Two Fallacies of the Military Paradigm

Knowing the Knowable: Two Fallacies of the Military Paradigm

The U.S. military paradigm is rooted in two dangerously outmoded assumptions about 21st-century reality. First is the military’s assumption of proportionality, or that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This leads to a corollary that causal relationships of the future are generally knowable. The second is the assumption of additivity: that the behaviors of a whole are a scaled reflection of that whole’s disaggregated parts. With this assumption, knowing the parts provides full knowledge of the whole, creating the belief that all wholes are knowable through aggregating the knowledge of their parts.

Return from the Grave: The Domestic Nuclear Attack Threat

Return from the Grave: The Domestic Nuclear Attack Threat

American concern for a domestic nuclear attack atrophied after this policy change. The Cold War had ended without a nuclear crisis; so, too, had the age of terrorism. As the world advanced into the Digital Age, a full-scale nuclear war seemed completely incomprehensible, much less a more conventional conflict between nuclear-armed superpowers.

The Letter of the Law: Unclear Verbiage and Undefined Responsibilities

The Letter of the Law: Unclear Verbiage and Undefined Responsibilities

This article proposes that the United States’ space efforts should once again be backed by the government and the military, much as the original space program of the 1960s was and as the current-day space program of China is. The government should take an active interest in refining the language in the treaties to make them clearer in their restraints, as well as work to meet any rising military threats. As a matter for national determination and the preservation of power projection capabilities, it is important that the United States’ space efforts meet the efforts of adversarial nations.

Hungry Like the Wolf: Territorial Conquest and Great Power Competition in the New World

Hungry Like the Wolf: Territorial Conquest and Great Power Competition in the New World

Russia and China could succeed in weakening American influence in its far abroad and security in its near abroad through reliance on tried-and-true hybrid war/grey zone tactics. These indirect maneuvers are cheaper and easier to orchestrate under the U.S.’s nose than direct military operations and have the asymmetric effect of maximizing the impact of a minimal investment, stretching the power and reach of weaker powers confronting more powerful rivals.

Putin’s Jedi Mind Trick in Ukraine: How Truth Decay Shapes the Operational Environment

Putin’s Jedi Mind Trick in Ukraine: How Truth Decay Shapes the Operational Environment

Moscow’s falsehoods justifying imperial aggression and war crimes have penetrated cultural and geographic boundaries. It is only a matter of time before other authoritarian powers adopt similar tactics to excuse similar actions. To address this challenge, the United States and its allies should come to view truth decay as a multi-domain mechanism for shaping the operational environment to accommodate military aggression – a non-kinetic means to a kinetic end.

The U.S. Risks Arctic Irrelevance

The U.S. Risks Arctic Irrelevance

All Americans—be they beach-going Floridians, skiing Coloradans, or ranch-owning Texans—are citizens of an Arctic nation. But how many realize that? A lack of national arctic identity has contributed to a minimalist approach to policy in the Arctic region, leaving the U.S. strategically vulnerable. With Russia’s Northern Sea Route and Canada’s Northwest Passage both likely open year-round by the early 2030s, arctic policy indecision is a huge blind spot in great power competition. Although arctic awareness is slowly increasing as a topic in American policy circles, twenty-first century U.S. Arctic Policy has remained minimally resourced and underprioritized. If policymakers fail to address these strategic shortfalls, the U.S. risks arctic irrelevance by 2030.