I have been asked to be the token diversity candidate from outside the 4GW "church" today, and am honored just by the chance to appear at an event that preserves John Boyd's deep intellectual contributions, and to be on stage with my fellow panelists and Col Eric Walters. My assigned task is to explain why academics and historians have problems with the 4GW ...Read more >

Counterinsurgency (COIN) operations have been an integral part of warfare since 72 AD when the Romans defeated a Jewish insurgency at Masada.[i] Throughout the ages, resistance to kingdoms, armies, and ideals have arisen from forces with differing ideological beliefs and motivations contrary to those ...Read more >

In his seminal work, On War, Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz contends that war is a paradoxical trinity, metaphorically suspended between three phenomena, namely primordial violence (or the indelible passion of people), the play of chance and probability, and the subordination to government policy ...Read more >

Both analysts and strategists have a tendency to categorize various security threats in rather neat categories. In many likely most cases these categories simply do not fit well for areas where there is significant internal insecurity. This particularly is the case for groups that can be called hybrids or shape shifters. Armed groups have an unfortunate tendency to shift both their form and significance to ...Read more >

Mission Command is emerging as a multifaceted construct that integrates the functions and techniques of the art and science employed during the exercise of command authority over missions applying military and other instruments of national ...Read more >

THESE QUOTES ENGENDER two truisms about the military organizations of great powers: they embrace the big-war paradigm, and because they are large, hierarchical institutions, they generally innovate ...Read more >

In the January 1998 issue of the Proceedings, Vice Admiral Cebrowski and Mr. Garstka provided a detailed look at the US Navy’s concept for Network-Centric Warfare. They predict emerging networked information systems will give the owner of those systems total dominance on the battlefield. Their enemies will be so overmatched by this system of system that they will have no choice but to submit. The authors feel the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) has changed the fundamental nature of ...Read more >

For thousands of soldiers deployed to Iraq in supprot of Operation Iraqi Freedom,life can be divided into two distinct realms.There is the life spent conducting missions in Iraqi neighborhoods constantly scanning the area for suspicious activity,weapons locked and loaded for action,and adrenaline pumping situations. And then there is the life on the Forward Operating Base catching up on sleep,pumping iron in the gym and surfing the Internet.FOBs have evolved form the Department of Defense ...Read more >

There is some truth to the argument that Russia’s initial failures in Grozny and Chechnya as a whole can be traced directly to Moscow’s reliance on out-of-date Soviet strategic thinking. The Soviets, expecting to fight in central and western Europe, believed that the enemy would prefer to declare its cities open rather than have them destroyed by combat. To the Soviets, therefore, urban terrain presented two options: if a city was defended, it was to be bypassed; if it was not, it could ...Read more >

The poor devil in the army is marching tremendous distances, he is in the mud,he’s filthy dirty, he hasn’t had a full meal, he makes his maximum exertion before the fight and [he has had] a minimum of sleep and a minimum of well-prepared food,and then he fights in a place he has never seen before and probably goes into it in the hours of darkness. His communications are not fastened in by some contractor like Westinghouse [on] a ship. His communications are mobile and have moved about and ...Read more >

This paper looks at small wars as they have occurred since the Cold War’s end from the perspective of how they have changed in character from the pattern of small wars that dominated the Cold War period. It does this by first defining small wars and then describing the dominant small war paradigm as a baseline for analysis. It considers some of the agents of change that have existed in the global security environment since 1990 and uses these to account for the changing character of small wars. ...Read more >

The Gulf War has significantly influenced our attitudes and perceptions about war. The New Concept views war as conflict won quickly and decisively with minimum casulties. The means to this end is superior military technology applied within the context of Joint combined arms operations.Conditions necessary for the new concept to deliver quick, low cost victory may be articulated as attributes which characterize the ideal enemy.Evaluation on the level of strategic theory indicates the asymmetric ...Read more >

In this paper, we outline the requirements of a planning and decision aid to support small US Army units operating in urban terrain and describe the prototype system we have built that demonstrates how AI planning technologies can be exploited in this context. The post cold war environment poses new challenges for the US Army. It is anticipated that in future it will operate more extensively in small conflicts within urban terrain (cities and towns). This is termed Military Operations in Urban ...Read more >

Less than a month after US Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee1 Operation Iraq Freedom was initiated.General Shinseki had already considered the consequences of the invasion of Iraq based on his experiences in Bosnia a decade earlier;the United States Army would need several hundred thousand soldiers in the posthostilities phase. The invasion of Iraq began on March 20, 2003; a little over six weeks later President Bush landed on the ...Read more >

The Cold War came to an end with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In its wake was a sea of uncertainty about the future shape of the international security environment. Francis Fukuyamas The End of History and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations typified attempts to describe the future security environment. Politically, the end of the Cold War signaled an opportunity to transfer money earmarked for the military and security institutions to other causes, the famed Peace ...Read more >