In many ways, military forces using AI on the battlefield is not new at all. At a simplistic level, the landmine is perhaps a good starting example. The first known record of landmines was in the 13th Century in China and they emerged in Europe somewhere between 1500 and 1600. Most landmines are not intelligent and all and apply a binary logic of “kill” or “don’t kill.” What landmines lack, and one of the primary reasons they are banned by most countries, is the ability to use just and discriminate force. As far as computers have come since the British used “The Bombe” to break the Enigma code, the human mind still has an advantage in determining the just and discriminate use of force and thinking divergently about the second and third order effects resulting from the use of force. But, according to some, that advantage may not last for long.
Eight Good Questions Strategic Thinkers Should Ask
Strategic thinking can happen almost anywhere: in a conference room, a university lecture hall, or in the dark basement of a military headquarters. If you think about it, really anyone can do it, from a president to an Army private, from a subject matter expert to an armchair general. Although anyone can do it at any time and in any place, doing it well is neither easy nor is it commonplace.
Seven Charts That Help Explain American War
Stuck in the “Frenemy Zone”
Many scholars, such as Noam Chomsky, have asserted that understanding the way we use language is important, as words shape the way we conceptualize, communicate, and act. Therefore, it is prudent to define the key term up front. After a brief search, I was very surprised to find a formal definition of frenemy in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a person with whom one is friendly, despite a fundamental dislike or rivalry; a person who combines the characteristics of a friend and an enemy.” I was also quite surprised to find that it was the journalist Walter Winchell who first coined the term in 1953 when he wrote, “Howz about calling the Russians our frenemies?”
What Successful Strategists Read
The bottom-line is that there already exists a long list of lists advising strategists on what they should read. At best, the analysis presented here provides one more list to consider. To remain open-minded, hopefully a strategic thinker would never limitthemselves to any list. Nevertheless, the hope is that individuals find the results of this survey valuable as they chart their course of self-study and reflection, wherever that may take them.
Clausewitz’s Military Genius and the #Human Dimension
If war is an inherently human phenomenon, then discussion of the human aspects of war is as timeless as the discussion of war itself. One prudent start point for any discussion on military matters is the philosophy of war described by the 19th century theorist Carl Von Clausewitz. In one of the lesser read sections of On War, he described what comprised the penultimate military genius. This article explores Clausewitz’s description of military genius as a point of discussion in the ongoing human dimension dialogue. In Clausewitz, we have a life-long soldier describing what it takes to reach the highest strata of the profession of arms; we would be wise to listen to what he has to say.
