Despite the multitude of domestic issues facing the United States as it approaches a presidential election, policymakers must also not lose sight of enduring foreign threats to the nation. Members of both political parties generally agree China constitutes the preeminent national security concern. How should the United States, in a post-COVID world, check Chinese global influence to best protect American national interests?
Embedding Creativity in Professional Military Education: Understanding Creativity and Its Implementation
This article is a call for professional military education to embrace a deeper, richer, and more thoughtful discussion on the phenomenon of creativity and its integration into curriculum. Indeed, we argue it is an essential ingredient in any equation that seeks to produce intellectual overmatch in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. The deliberate investment in creativity within professional military education is a meaningful step towards equipping the uniformed services to see beyond what the adversary can contemplate.
Managing Chaos: Biosecurity in a Post-COVID-19 America
COVID-19 is an understated watershed moment in U.S. national security, whereby a naturally-occurring virus has thrown individual citizens and the highest levels of leadership into disarray. The COVID-19 pandemic is driving perceptions of U.S. susceptibility to immensely disruptive biological threats and increases the likelihood of an artificial attack. This monumental shift in threat perception creates appealing circumstances for U.S. adversaries to experiment with emergent biotechnology.
After the Calamity: Unexpected Effects of Epidemics on War
Though the death toll from COVID-19 does not seem to be as calamitous as the historical epidemics referenced here, it may influence many actors in similarly profound ways. The economic damage will affect the ability of states to project power and support armed proxy groups. But domestic pressure and new internal rivalries that emerge from the pandemic could cause some belligerents to embark on risky military endeavors in the short term.
Disinformation Disruption and Distance: Public Confidence in the U.S. Military in the COVID-19 Era
Amidst the COVID-19 crisis, trust in institutions and leadership face a unique vulnerability that foreign actors are poised to exploit. This article describes a unique nexus of institutional confidence and societal vulnerability to foreign disinformation, the prevalent tactics used to leverage the American information ecosystem, and ways the U.S. military can better support the society it is charged to defend.
Food Aid and Conflict: The Need for Reform
Faced with staggering levels of global hunger, the transportation, aid, and military communities need to evaluate the best use of a limited budget. It should not continue funding largely obsolete ships. Instead, it should be used to feed the hungry and use soft power to diffuse conflict before it occurs. Of course, policy is not limited to black and white binaries, and amending aid disbursement procedures will not come without some negative ramifications. However, eliminating cargo preference will almost invariably do more good than harm. Lives saved, people fed, and conflict assuaged, at little cost to maritime security.
Building the Airmen We Need: Upskilling for the Digital Age
Technology adds speed and efficiency to work environments, but also complexity as workers of all types integrate disparate software applications and datasets, requiring them to use higher cognitive skills to do their jobs effectively. COVID-19 has only emphasized this point—our ability to respond to modern-day crises increasingly depends on the digital capabilities organizations possess. The current crisis has taught people to communicate, team, learn and overcome challenges differently in the Digital Age. As such, troops at all levels have new opportunities to solve complex problems, redesign workflows, and scale solutions—if provided permission and expertise.
An Alternative/Alternate History of the U.S. Response to COVID-19
Still, in our alternate history, Americans and their leaders learned important lessons. First, the cost of letting finance dictate the structure of the U.S. economy was too great, especially for a nation that aspired to play a role of global leadership. Allowing firms to offshore production to exploit low wages for cheaper goods, but unfettered capital mobility was a crippling handicap for a nation beset by a pandemic. Second, skilled labor, particularly in manufacturing and in other industries, takes time to develop—it is not a resource that one can reconstitute with a finger snap or a problem at which one can throw money.
Distributable Platforms and Determined Marines: The Necessity of Operational Art in a 21st Century Marine Corps
As the Marine Corps continues to posture itself for a challenging, uncertain future, it is crucial that the organization uses this transformation process as an opportunity to revisit its foundational doctrine and adjust where needed to carry the service forward into the 21st century. Although strings of operational thinking already exist within the service’s doctrine and culture, the concept of operational art remains strangely excluded. As with the incorporation of any new idea into doctrine, it will require deliberate development, creative implementation, thoughtful application, and education to harvest a worthwhile return on investment.
The COVID-19 Pandemic and Geopolitics
Because the pandemic is still evolving, its final impact will remain unknown for months, if not years, in terms of how resulting changes may fundamentally transform the balance of global influence and resulting equilibrium. The responses by major and regional powers to the pandemic and how they are interpreted domestically and internationally are already having and will continue to have significant geopolitical implications. Those responses will prove to be highly consequential in the long term, especially when it comes to how nations manage the central levers of geopolitical power.
The Past and Future of Land Warfare in the High North
Most national security discourse concerned with the High North centers around icebreakers, shipping lanes, and so on. However, combat in Arctic conditions offers little new stimulus to naval and airpower practitioners because of the relative global uniformity of their domains. The changing Arctic will have far greater impacts on ground combat by restricting the mobility of units across already-difficult terrain and by exacerbating the logistical and life support needs of these formations.
Women, Peace, and Security at Twenty
In the United States, Congress passed the 2017 Women, Peace, and Security Act with bipartisan support, and the 2019 Strategy notionally indicates White House support. The intent is to begin to hold organizations accountable for implementation, especially in the Department of Defense. Only accountability at all levels of all relevant organizations will assure implementation of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda—with all of its clear benefits—becomes a reality.
Britain and Europe in the Brexit Years
The complex challenges of the 2020s were always set to be difficult for the European powers to contend with but the Brexit decision—the biggest strategic shift in policy within Europe since the end of the Cold War and one taken as an afterthought by a British electorate with other issues on its mind in the referendum—has increased the risks of strategic policy failure for all European powers.
Establishing an Arctic Security Institution: Essentials from NORAD and NATO
The High North is creeping back into the global strategic picture with increasing difficulty in avoiding discussion involving defense issues. Key studies on the question of what defense institutions, especially NATO and NORAD, should—or should not—do in the region have proliferated over the years, particularly following Russia’s 2014 Crimean fait accompli. Akin to the next great game, a final frontier set to host a battle for Arctic riches and unclaimed territory, the High North is a strategic theater devoid of agreed rules.
Using Global Media Big Data to Understand China’s Soft Power Efforts
The 2020 Strategy Bridge Student Writing Competition on Strategy
The Strategy Bridge’s Student Writing Competition is back for 2020! The competition is open to students attending civilian universities and military war or staff colleges at every level, including distance learning, correspondence, and fellowship programs between 1 Jun 2019 and 31 May 2020. The competition deadline is 1 Jun 2020. Winning articles will be announced in July 2020 and published on The Strategy Bridge thereafter.
Technological Optimism and the Imagined Future: Implications for Warfare
Artificial Intelligence and the Manufacturing of Reality
Humans are and have always been vulnerable to being tricked, provoked, conditioned, deceived, or otherwise manipulated. Since at least the 1960s, the Soviet military and subsequent Russian organizations recognized opportunities for exploiting this vulnerability. That is why the Soviets developed a formal research program—called reflexive control theory—to model how one could manipulate targets’ perceptions of reality…While the Russians weaponized reflexive control theory, Madison Avenue used similar logic to evoke emotion—and sell products to American consumers…The contemporary information environment and modern tools, including artificial intelligence, could slash the transaction costs of such manipulation.
Wargaming Contested Narratives in an Age of Bewilderment
In our hyper-connected world, it is not only great powers but also a wide range of activists, extremists, and many others manipulating the information environment and employing powerful narratives to achieve strategic ends. There is a new premium on influence, and it is this “mysterious glue” of stories that has enabled mass cooperation networks since the beginning of our human species.
