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

The Unknowable Future of Warfare

The Unknowable Future of Warfare

Leaders and strategists would do well to remind themselves of past failures to predict the future, as they are just as fallible as their predecessors and equally susceptible to adopting visions of what is to come that later prove erroneous. Consequently, they should assume a more modest and skeptical approach to future projections and focus more on improving flexibility and critical thinking than correctly predicting what lies around the corner. Doing so offers the best chance to successfully navigate the unforeseen twists ahead.

The Fallacy of the Short, Sharp War: Optimism Bias and the Abuse of History

The Fallacy of the Short, Sharp War: Optimism Bias and the Abuse of History

War is naturally characterized by uncertainty, and humans are known to exhibit an in-built optimism bias that frequently causes them to overestimate the likelihood of positive outcomes. This bias may have evolutionarily adaptive advantages in many situations. Yet in the dialectic between military planners generating coercive options within available means and national cabinets seeking solutions to intractable diplomatic or geostrategic problems within acceptable costs, optimism bias can lead to tragic and avoidable outcomes.

The Armenia and Azerbaijan Conflict is a Test of International Norms: The United States is Failing

The Armenia and Azerbaijan Conflict is a Test of International Norms: The United States is Failing

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine proved what can happen when international norms break down. The Western response to that invasion showed what the international community is able to do to enforce those norms. Reversing it in one place while allowing the norm to be violated in another sets a dangerous precedent that will lead to more adventurism and testing of what a regime can get away with when it chooses war to advance its policies.

Strategic Amnesia: The U.S. Army’s Stubborn Rush to Its Next War

Strategic Amnesia: The U.S. Army’s Stubborn Rush to Its Next War

In the headlong rush to move past Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army's preparation for near-peer conflict means failing to institutionalize the strategic lessons learned. By ignoring the last 20 years of fighting, the Army is failing to prepare appropriately for the more ambiguous battlefields of today. The Army has failed to fully develop a strategic understanding of counterinsurgency wars in its rush to fight the conventional war, instead focusing on tactical improvements.

The Book of War is Written By Chance: Napoleon’s 1812 March and the Challenge of Using History as a Guide for Strategy

The Book of War is Written By Chance: Napoleon’s 1812 March and the Challenge of Using History as a Guide for Strategy

Preparing for future warfare based on historical lessons has long been fundamental to military leadership and strategy. Napoleon’s study of history and march on Moscow illustrate why even the most assiduous students of history often follow their predecessors into disaster.

Historical Guideposts: Illuminating the Future of Warfare

Historical Guideposts: Illuminating the Future of Warfare

A nation’s political and military leaders must objectively seek out and use history's lessons as guideposts, capturing and applying lessons learned from the most repeated, catastrophic missteps of others to remain adaptable to future warfare's most probable scenarios. History matters more in avoiding past catastrophes than predicting specific events years into the future.

Foresight-Driven Warfare: Bringing Futures Thinking Into The Next Fight

Foresight-Driven Warfare: Bringing Futures Thinking Into The Next Fight

The art of trying to envision the future is not a cure-all; foresight-driven warfare is what we seek. The goal of any nation should be to prepare for various plausible futures or outcomes, which drives down strategic risk, enables a state to become operationally flexible, and positions a state with the means necessary to fight the next fight. Achieving foresight driven national strategy, defense policy, and modernization begins with finding an effective model for planners, which might include Scenario Planning. Scenario Planning methodologies provide prognosticators a way to envision multiple plausible futures versus a singular outcome for a complex, adaptive global system.

Conflict Realism: A New School of Thought for Examining the Future of Armed Conflict

Conflict Realism: A New School of Thought for Examining the Future of Armed Conflict

Not formalized in existing literature, four basic schools of thought exist in the conflict and defense studies fields. These camps include the Futurist, Traditionalist, Institutionalist, and Conflict Realism. Each of these camps provides value to the study of armed conflict. Yet, the over-reliance on one camp over others creates unhelpful distortions and implications that can impede the student and practitioner of war’s ability to think clearly about war and warfare. A holistic view of armed conflict, which takes into consideration all four camps, is needed to help overcome unhelpful distortions and find the essence of the problems in armed conflict.

When Predicting the Future, Remember, You’re Probably Wrong

When Predicting the Future, Remember, You’re Probably Wrong

History remains the best guide to predicting the future — but such predictions are still more likely than not to be wrong. Those who postulate and prognosticate on the future of warfare, and those consuming their output, would be well served by keeping this in mind. Such is the nature of predicting the future writ large, and this applies in the realm of warfare.

1Q23: Historical Lessons and an Unknown Future

1Q23: Historical Lessons and an Unknown Future

To begin 2023, we wanted to explore the relationship between historical lessons and preparation for an unknown future. This quarterly thus examines preparation for future warfare based on historical lessons, learned or not. How have states and other actors envisioned future warfare? How did they prepare, or fail to prepare, for future warfare? Are these lessons of use to states and other actors as they prepare for future conflict?

#Reviewing The Lone Leopard

#Reviewing The Lone Leopard

In his novel The Lone Leopard, Sharifullah Dorani provides a sweeping view of the struggle that Afghans endured under the burden of foreign influence, ethnic and religious seams, and the clash between traditional conservative cultural norms versus more modern liberal western ideals. The book does an excellent job of bringing the reader into the complicated societal mosaic that makes Afghanistan so unique.

#Reviewing Against All Tides

#Reviewing Against All Tides

The “Kitty Hawk Race Riot'” holds an important place in American naval history. An illustration of the deep and unavoidable connections between the sailors and officers of the Navy and the society they served during the Civil Rights era, it is often mentioned in passing but rarely examined in detail. Marv Truhe’s new book sets out to rectify that oversight and to help readers dive deeply into both the details of the history and the important questions it raises about the Navy of the 1970s as well as the Navy of the 21st century.

#Reviewing The Digital Silk Road

#Reviewing The Digital Silk Road

This short, yet comprehensive, and extensively documented examination of the Digital Silk Road and the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to develop world-dominating technology (through collaboration between the military, state-owned enterprises, and closely associated parastatal private companies), will be of interest to policymakers, national security professionals, and hopefully U.S. and Western business leaders.

#Reviewing Backfire

#Reviewing Backfire

In a series of short, engaging, and clearly written chapters, Demarais breaks down why the U.S. found sanctions such an appealing policy instrument; how their widespread use in the 1990s and 2000s triggered changes and upheavals, as countries around the world coped with the issues of challenges of compliance; and, finally, how sanctions implementation has generally backfired, imposing costs on the U.S. and its allies while encouraging targeted states towards policies and strategies designed to insulate their governments and economies from U.S. pressure.

#Reviewing Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century

#Reviewing Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century

In this welcome addition to the literature on alliances, international relations scholar Alexander Lanoszka makes an optimistic case for the continued salience of the U.S.-led alliance system. In his two-hundred-page study, he reviews the most common areas that past studies have focused on: alliance formation, fears of entrapment and abandonment, burden-sharing, warfare, and alliance termination.

The Master Negotiator?

The Master Negotiator?

The title of Negroponte’s book nicely sums up her work. Her first four segments explore questions and themes related to James Baker’s overall time as secretary of state. She explores the real goal for the foreign policy review initiated by the National Security Council and how it affected all aspects of President George H.W. Bush’s administration; the challenges of German reunification and Germany’s admission to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); the response of the United States to the June 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre; and the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

#Reviewing Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America's Misguided Wars

#Reviewing Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America's Misguided Wars

Despite its omissions, Paths of Dissent is an exceptionally substantive and moving book for anyone interested in personal accounts at the intersection of ethics and military service…As America exits another costly decades-long counterinsurgency era  into an uncertain future, it  requires courageous dissenters…to avoid national security malpractice. It is only by capturing the perspectives of those who are willing to make personal sacrifices in informing the public’s understanding of war that principled countries can avoid waste and hypocrisy in its conduct.

#Reviewing The American Way of Irregular Warfare

#Reviewing The American Way of Irregular Warfare

While satisfied with the U.S. military’s tactical performance in irregular warfare, Cleveland rejects the argument that special operations can raid their way to victory or capture enough terrain. Cleveland uses the strategic failures of the U.S. in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan to argue the U.S. military must focus on its failure to structurally, doctrinally, and militarily invest in irregular warfare to succeed.