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 The Military and the Market

#Reviewing The Military and the Market

Looking beyond more traditionally studied factors such as battlefield tactics, leadership, and military strategy, new studies under the general War and Society umbrella take into account social dynamics such as race, class, and gender in the context of national defense and warfare. In the case of The Military and the Market, the wide scholarly aperture offered by the War and Society approach extends to marketplace and economic factors, adding additional layers of complexity to American military history.

#Reviewing Is Remote Warfare Moral

#Reviewing Is Remote Warfare Moral

Is Remote Warfare Moral? Weighing Issues of Life and Death from 7,000 Miles by Joseph O. Chapa is a thoughtful and necessary contribution to the literature on RPA warfare. The book’s biggest contribution is that of a primary source from a seasoned veteran and RPA instructor in the United States Air Force. The book also elucidates some of the ambiguity surrounding RPA warfare.

#Reviewing From Hegemony to Competition

#Reviewing From Hegemony to Competition

From Hegemony to Competition: Marine Perspectives on Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations offers thoughtful examinations of important elements of the transition to what the 2018 National Security Strategy called a new era of Great Power competition and how new Marine Corps concepts continue to develop. This book’s great strength is the questions that it is asking, and the rigorous efforts put forth to study them.

#Reviewing Union General

#Reviewing Union General

Shea successfully demonstrates that more attention should be paid to this understudied Union general. Curtis’ wartime emancipation policies should shift historians’ narrowed focus away from the Eastern Theater to more thoroughly integrate the trans-Mississippi West into their analyses of wartime emancipation. Hopefully, Union General will inspire other historians to incorporate Curtis into the current historiography on wartime emancipation, the Missouri and Arkansas home front, and Civil War memory. Ultimately, Union General is a worthy addition to the scholarship on military leadership and will appeal to readers.

Drugs, Ethnic Lobbies, and U.S. Domestic Politics: #Reviewing The Turkish Arms Embargo

Drugs, Ethnic Lobbies, and U.S. Domestic Politics: #Reviewing The Turkish Arms Embargo

Goode’s corrective to the history of this incident is an important work in the study of U.S. foreign policy entering its last phase of the Cold War. Goode skillfully places the embargo in a new light, emphasizing the role of ethnic lobbies, the U.S. war on drugs, and the political negotiations on Capitol Hill. Long considered a failure of U.S. foreign policy in a time of executive turmoil and legislative assertiveness, Goode suggests the episode was a demonstration of the dynamics of political processes in a functioning representative society.

#Reviewing The Avoidable War

#Reviewing The Avoidable War

All told, Kevin Rudd’s The Avoidable War is very much worth the time and effort. Through a series of missteps in execution, it takes Rudd a while to get the reader onboard with his topic. Once there, however, the information provided is valuable, and Rudd’s perspective from personal experience does give his words an air of authority in these matters. For those starting out on their journey to understand what is arguably the world’s most important contemporary competition, this book is a fine place to begin.

A Tale of Two Armies: #Reviewing Putin’s Wars

A Tale of Two Armies: #Reviewing Putin’s Wars

Labeled an acute threat by the U.S. Department of Defense in its 2022 National Defense Strategy, the Russian military in Ukraine revealed itself as the flimsiest of paper tigers, a modern-day Potemkin army meant to prop up a faltering regime and its neo-imperialist visions. Where were the unmanned vehicles and the modernized tanks and the fire strikes employed in eastern Ukraine in 2014? Was that army actually a mirage, with the real army now being bled dry eight years later? There was no way that two disparate things, two photo negatives of each other, could exist at the same time. Can two divergent ideas—or two opposite armies—both be true?

#Reviewing The Wandering Army

#Reviewing The Wandering Army

The Wandering Army offers a new and powerful perspective on debates surrounding the British way of war. By suggesting observational and experiential learning in previous wars led to experimentation and knowledge diffusion throughout the officer class, Davies challenges previous views on an old subject. As such, he makes a great contribution to the field of military history and is one that should be considered of interest to experts as Davies crafts a very interesting book that furthers opportunities for study and debate.

#Reviewing Desert Redleg

#Reviewing Desert Redleg

The book’s title alone might suggest a more general history or analysis of the use of artillery in the Gulf War, but the book is primarily a wartime memoir framed by the experiences of a senior artilleryman whose perspectives were shaped in the Cold War’s final decade. As a memoir, Desert Redleg lands somewhere between the classic campaign and sentimental forms. In an appendix, the author dedicates a chapter to lessons of the war gleaned from a broader military and geo-political perspective.

Grand Strategy is What States Make of It: #Reviewing Wars of Revelation

Grand Strategy is What States Make of It: #Reviewing Wars of Revelation

Reconsideration of U.S. grand strategy is critical in the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine alongside rising tensions with China. Rebecca Lissner’s Wars of Revelation makes a compelling argument that past U.S. military interventions have played an important role in shaping U.S. grand strategy.

Lost Tradition: #Reviewing Strategiya

Lost Tradition: #Reviewing Strategiya

A shroud of myth and legend surrounds Russian strategy. As far back as the 1980s, the U.S. began looking at the widespread use of precision-guided munitions and other associated technology because the Russians had an allegedly more advanced conception of their potential. In 1982, the operational level of war debuted in U.S. doctrine, allegedly because it existed in Soviet doctrine. The only way to combat such misconceptions is to take the Russians at their word. Specifically, by reading their words. Strategiya: The Foundations of the Russian Art of Strategy, edited by Dr. Ofer Fridman, Lecturer at King’s College London, is one of the best weapons available.

#Reviewing Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961–1975

#Reviewing Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961–1975

The history of African decolonization is inherently linked with the processes, rivalries, and challenges of the global Cold War. Even those states that saw a pacific removal of colonial authority, such as Ghana or Senegal, did so under the shadow of the rivalry between the capitalist and communist states. However, the process was even more stark in Southern Africa, where the Cold War saw the contests for armed African liberation interpreted as proxy conflicts between the two ideological blocs.

History Points to the Most Probable Conclusion in Ukraine: Scorched Earth or Regime Change

History Points to the Most Probable Conclusion in Ukraine: Scorched Earth or Regime Change

Russia and Ukraine are locked in a war that has outlasted any realistic forecast. Why are these nations still engaged in a conflict that is so detrimental to both sides? Because these two countries have a shared history that includes scorched earth and the wilful destruction of personal property rather than forfeiture, the most likely outcome is either complete victory for one party, or regime change that brings the war to a rapid conclusion. Over a thousand years of invasions, occupation, and suffering have influenced the psyches of both the Ukrainians and Russians in ways that make only two outcomes likely.

Does Economic Deterrence Work? Understanding the West’s Assumptions About Keeping Russia in Check

Does Economic Deterrence Work? Understanding the West’s Assumptions About Keeping Russia in Check

In the lead-up to the February 24, 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Western nations threatened Russia with severe economic sanctions, export controls, and other punitive economic measures if it proceeded with an invasion. These threats were ignored. Over a year into the invasion, Russia’s economy and war-fighting capabilities are hurting. Punitive economic measures by the West have shut Russia out of the global economy and challenged its ability to profit from oil sales, import critical technology, and finance its war effort.

Intelligence Failures and Political Misjudgment in an Age of Ideological Change

Intelligence Failures and Political Misjudgment in an Age of Ideological Change

Faulty assumptions about the ideological realities on the ground, at both the popular- and elite-level, are not unique to the Russian case, but can be widely applied to current geopolitical concerns that attract the attention of U.S. policymakers, especially those which are hypothesized to potentially require future American military operations.

What Happens If Great Powers Don’t Fight Great Wars?

What Happens If Great Powers Don’t Fight Great Wars?

The proper lesson for us today to draw from history is that conflict abhors a vacuum, and threats will take advantage of whatever domain is available. Certainly an argument should be made for increasing traditional lethality in the force, but must that come at the expense of other required capabilities? If we believe that wars are prevented in competition and that adversaries will use all available ways and means in conflict, then the Army must consider diverse solutions to deter and win in both Large-Scale Combat Operations (LSCO) and non- LSCO Multi-Domain Operations

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

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

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.

The Ethics of Meaning Making in War: A Framework for Understanding Ukraine

The Ethics of Meaning Making in War: A Framework for Understanding Ukraine

Progress in Russia’s invasion of the sovereign territory of Ukraine is commonly measured in terms of land control. This metric does not paint the whole picture. The war has spilled over into the quasi-boundaryless digital realm where contests over the meaning and nature of the conflict rage. These conflagrations over issues of meaning are strategically significant; their outcome could mean the difference between winning in the court of public opinion, thereby obtaining much needed global support—or not.