Following the overwhelming response to our 1st quarterly series on the next National Security Strategy, The Strategy Bridge is shifting gears. Our 2nd quarter series is all about assumptions in policy, strategy, and military strategy. What problematic or powerful assumption(s) should The Strategy Bridge readers contemplate and why?
How the U.S. Can Recapture Escalation Control
Escalation control was once firmly part of the U.S. strategic lexicon. The term fell into disuse because it was assumed U.S. unipolarity made it dominant in any post-Cold War political-military competition. But such assumptions are clearly incorrect today. Indeed, U.S. responses to rival nations’ efforts to dominate escalation narratives have tended to telegraph timidity rather than strength.
The White Elephant in the Room: Antarctica in Modern Geopolitics
Antarctica’s isolation may have set the stage for a hard pivot in global interest. Discarding these holdover assumptions will be important to recalibrate our understanding of the region’s strategic relevance. Without reform to the Antarctic Treaty system, and great powers assuming collective responsibility, Antarctica could even become a potential catalyst for outright conflict.
Assumptionitis in Strategy
Former Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis identified a lack of strategy and strategic thinking in the United States’ national security policy discourse. This problem is complex, multifaceted, and caused by a number of factors, including a lack of understanding of what strategy is, and is not, and how to educate strategists, an inability or unwillingness to identify and understand core strategic issues, the tyranny of the present, and a fickle public. This article alleviates some of the challenges of living in a strategy-free mode by focusing on the development of strategic thinking and strategies that are based on empirically realistic assumptions consistent with decision making and behavior in the real world.
2nd Quarter 2021 Journal Index
Following the overwhelming response to our 1st quarterly series on the next National Security Strategy, The Strategy Bridge is shifting gears. Our 2nd quarter series is all about assumptions in policy, strategy, and military strategy. What problematic or powerful assumption(s) should The Strategy Bridge readers contemplate and why?
Getting Serious About Women, Peace & Security
Washington is littered with strategies covering everything from cyber, nuclear, and space to a national strategy to promote the health of honey bees. Some strategies get more attention than others, with a nexus to the National Security Strategy a fast track to prominence. Will the NSS get serious about women, peace and security?
A Comprehensive Approach to Space Deterrence
2nd Quarter 2021 Journal Call for Articles
Following the overwhelming response to our 1st quarterly series on the next National Security Strategy, The Strategy Bridge is shifting gears. Our 2nd quarter series is all about assumptions in policy, strategy, and military strategy. What problematic or powerful assumption(s) should The Strategy Bridge readers contemplate and why?
Breaking the Move-Countermove Cycle: Using Net Assessment to Guide Technology
To guide its National Security Strategy’s technology priorities, the Biden Administration should turn to analytic methods that rely less on predictions of future scenarios and capabilities. Instead, they should use the net assessment methodology pioneered by Andrew Marshall and others during the Cold War. Although there is no fixed methodology to conduct a net assessment, in general it evaluates trends in each competitor’s strategy, doctrine, and capabilities a decade or more in the past and future to identify asymmetries.
Introduction to the First Quarterly Series of 2021: From Our Inbox To Your Browser
Questions are our best friends for the invention and refinement of strong useful theory, and they are the lethal enemies of poor theory. So suggests Colin Gray. These questions then undergird and shape strategic thinking. What theoretical and empirical question should most inform the rewriting of the U.S. National Security Strategy? This quarter’s series seeks compelling arguments to inform the senior leaders responsible for authoring the next U.S. National Security Strategy.
1st Quarter 2021 Journal Call for Papers
“Questions are our best friends for the invention and refinement of strong useful theory, and they are the lethal enemies of poor theory.” So suggests Colin Gray. These questions then undergird and shape strategic thinking. What theoretical and empirical question should most inform the rewriting of the U.S. National Security Strategy? This quarter’s series seeks answers to inform the senior leaders responsible for authoring the next U.S. National Security Strategy.
New Year New Bridge
New year, new format, new Managing Editors: same quality journal. Over the last seven years The Strategy Bridge has grown, it has moved, and matured. Begun as a passion project on strategy by a handful of optimistic young professionals, today The Strategy Bridge hosts a Journal with over 2,000 articles and reviews, our New Model Mentoring gatherings continue, and The Strategy Bridge Podcast has released thirty episodes. Our Masthead boasts a team of over twenty volunteers who work hard to bring you what you’ve come to expect from The Strategy Bridge: products that are read, respected, and referenced across our community.
A Year in #Reviewing
It’s been a year of Zoom, but books endure. Books endure because we read them in isolation, wrote about them in lockdown, and read reviews about them in quarantine. It will take books—with their focus, length, use of evidence, ability to recreate events, and capacity to make sense of those events after the fact—on 2020 and all it entailed to make the light and shadow fall in ways that illuminate what lived experience alone cannot. And for that kind of long-term, sustained engagement with the contexts in which we read this year’s reviews, we’ll continue to need not just books, but writing about those books.
The Department of Defense Needs to Relearn the (Almost) Lost Art of Net Assessment
Defense officials and analysts have advanced a wide range of solutions to the U.S. military’s operational and budgetary challenges. Most proposals strike familiar notes: invest in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, hypersonics, and unmanned systems; do more experimentation; recruit and manage the force more effectively. These are arguably the table stakes in a great-power competition. To gain and sustain an advantage, the Department of Defense must do more than just get better; it will need to build on U.S. strengths in ways that exploit adversary vulnerabilities and undermine enemy confidence.
The Air Force America Needs: Innovation, Spark Tank, and Ideas to Sustain Air Force Dominance
The U.S. Air Force must prioritize leadership follow-up and engagement and organizational ownership of innovative solutions to show airmen that their ideas can be implemented. Not every idea should be enacted, but of the projects vetted and nominated by major commands and selected by Headquarters Air Force, the majority should be. This focus on implementation with the solutions recommended above will achieve and accelerate change to ensure the Air Force remains the dominant force America needs it to be in the years to come.
Surprise and Shock in Warfare: An Enduring Challenge
Surprise needs to be a core part of training, planning, doctrine, and strategy, particularly the ability to adapt to situations as they are. Even then, no military has ever consistently overcome the problem of battlefield surprise, meaning that it will remain an ongoing challenge and opportunity. Napoleon’s opening observation that avoiding surprise requires constant mental vigilance echoes earlier Roman and Byzantine military guidance.
Autonomous Systems in the Combat Environment: The Key or the Curse to the U.S.
The U.S. military has already begun to incorporate artificial intelligence into its operations. However, the use of autonomous machines in the U.S. could be said to be quite conservative in comparison to its adversaries. Although artificial intelligence assists in providing risk predictions and improving time available to react to events, some believe artificial intelligence and autonomous systems will drastically distance humans from a direct combat role. Observations regarding the complexity of warfare, regardless of the technology, force scientists and military leaders to question the potential consequences of implementing artificial intelligence and autonomous systems in the next military conflict.
#Reviewing Progressives in Navy Blue and #Interviewing Scott Mobley
The following interview is a collaboration between Dr. Lori Lyn Bogle and two of her students, Midshipman Lucas Almas and Midshipman Jacob Kinnear, and historian Scott Mobley from the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Dr. Mobley’s recent groundbreaking book, Progressives in Navy Blue: Maritime Strategy, American Empire, and the Transformation of U.S. Naval Identity, 1873-1898 is of special interest to current midshipmen at the United States Naval Academy and illuminates the complicated cultural shift in the officer corps as the service transformed from sail to steam following the Civil War that persists to this day.
Writing Strategy 2020
Earlier this year, The Strategy Bridge asked university and professional military education students to participate in our fourth annual student writing contest on the subject of strategy. The response was amazing. Now, we are pleased to announce the winners! We'll publish their essays, as well as some of the other submissions deserving an honorable mention, in a series in the very near future. We appreciate all the great submissions from the contest participants!
Why We Tweet: General Officer Use of Social Media to Engage, Influence, and Lead
For military institutions, social media is a mature tool that must move beyond the discretionary and into the realm of business as usual. In the absence of face-to-face interaction, social media is one of the most powerful ways for leaders to pass information, broadly convey intent, and for all of us to communicate, interact and foster professional sharing and discourse and build their capacity to influence.