April 2012
10 posts
1 tag
A Critical Perspective on Campaign Design
My new article at Small Wars Journal on the problems of campaign planning and Design.
My PPT from my presentation of this article at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto is available here.
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Even Patton Got It Wrong
Tom Ricks links to Patton’s Army War College paper:
The other day a friend sent along a 1932 War College paper by Maj. G.S. Patton Jr. on the likely characteristics of the next war. He actually got that next war wrong, predicting that small professional forces would prevail over mass armies. Or, as he puts it, “there is a reasonable probability that the next war will be characterized...
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Review: Command, Control, and the Common Defense
I finished reading Allard’s Command, Control, and the Common Defense. Published in 1996, Allard’s monograph examines the history of American command and control (C2). As I may have stated earlier, I tend to prefer fairly large and messy books with lots of small and interesting points to more organized books with a central point of contention.
Allard’s book is many...
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Intervention Podcast
I invited Alex Olesker, Rei Tang, Robert Caruso, Dan Trombly, and Kelsey Atherton over on Sunday and Monday nights for a quick chat on the Defense Clandestine Service, Flynn at DIA, and other subjects and to watch the second season of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. We also flew a “drone” around and made some pretty nerdy jokes.
This was a very ad hoc (even by our standards)...
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Notes on Command and Control
I am almost done with Ken Allard’s Command, Control, and the Common Defense.
It’s a very useful book (dated, to some degree—a chapter discusses the “growing modernization of the Soviet ground forces”) but there is a very acute understanding of the ways that new technology (which today is “old” technology, like the idea of standoff ground platforms and...
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Limited War and Other Things
At SWJ, I have an article looking at what limited war really is.
I’ve also written an extended take on the issue of policy relevance in scholarly work at my side blog Chimera of Austerlitz.
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Cyberpower and the State
I wrote a brief review of Cyberspace and the State for CTOVision.
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The Return of Power Projection
Two years ago, I wrote that the problem of “anti-access” lay less in the projected losses, but in the assumption that the problem was necessarily tactical. If a state was unwilling to commit to an operation because it might entail tough resistance, is this necessarily a techno-tactical problem? Moreover, the problems with amphibious assault and power projection seemed to be more...
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Complexity, Domains, and the End of the Rainbow
Two blogs recently caught my eye—although at a superficial glance they have little to do with each other.
First, Jack McDonald’s recent piece on complexity at KoW:
What, exactly, is a non-complex environment? Perhaps if we consider a pitched battle between two armies, we might approximate one. Even so, both those armies will have internal dynamics and external linkages. Napoleon had...
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Guest Post: Why Operational Access Is No...
The Army and Marine Corps have recently responded to the anti-access threat by releasing a joint operational access concept. Is It up to the test? Peter J. Munson and Nathan K. Finney have also teamed up to evaluate it from a joint perspective. As always, guest posters express only their own opinions.
Peter J. Munson is a Marine officer, aviator, and Middle East Foreign Area Officer currently...
