Since achieving victory in World War II, the United States military has a less than enviable combat record in irregular warfare. Through a detailed historical analysis, this article provides perspective on where past decisions and doctrines have led to defeat and where they may have succeeded if given more time or executed differently. In doing so, it provides lessons for future Army engagements and argues that until America becomes proficient in irregular warfare, our enemies will continue to fight us at the lower levels of the spectrum of conflict, where they have a good chance of exhausting our will to fight.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss3/3/

Keywords: irregular warfare, Vietnam, victory, Afghanistan, Iraq, landpower

Episode Transcript: “Why America’s Army Can’t Win America’s Wars”

Stephanie Crider (Host)

Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.

The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast guest and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

Decisive Point welcomes Dr. John Nagl, author of “Why America’s Army Can’t Win America’s Wars,” which was featured in the autumn 2022 issue of Parameters. Nagl is an associate professor of warfighting studies at the US Army War College. He is author of Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice.

Welcome to Decisive Point, John. Thank you for being here.

(John Nagl)

It’s terrific to be here, Stephanie. Thanks for having me.

Host

Let’s talk about “Why America’s Army Can’t Win America’s Wars.” You note in your article that since achieving victory in World War II, the United States military has a less-than-enviable combat record. Ouch. Give us a brief overview of where past decisions and doctrines have led to defeat.

(Nagl)

Yeah, I think “ouch” is the right word. And, of course, I love the Army dearly and care about the well-being of the nation. I’ve seen what happens when wars go badly. It’s very painful to write that, but it’s intended to be tough love for an organization that really matters. And for the most important country in the world, I might add.

What I argue in the article is that the United States government is one, three, and one in our nation’s wars, and I’ll go through them quickly. Korea (the Korean War), the first war after World War II, where the United States was decisive and won decisively: Korea ended in an armistice. The important lesson for that, I think, is the United States was unprepared for conventional combat in Korea. It was unprepared to be the global hegemon that the international order yearns for and so desperately needs.

And we learned from that. We created a state of readiness. The 2nd Infantry Division in Korea’s motto is “Fight tonight,” and they’re ready. And that readiness for combat—for conventional combat—is something that the American Army, I think, can be enormously proud of.

But, since Korea, with Vietnam (the Vietnam War); the first Iraq war (the Persian Gulf War); Afghanistan (the Afghanistan War); and the second Iraq war (the Iraq War), Operation Iraqi Freedom, our record is decidedly not as good. We are, I would argue, one and three in those wars, with (Operation) Desert Storm being a clear win, but Vietnam and Afghanistan being decisive losses, and the second Iraq war, the current Iraq war—it’s still too soon to tell, but it’s hard to put it in the win column. So I looked for—as I thought about the combat record of the United States military since World War II, I tried hard to isolate what it was that led to that less-than-enviable combat record. That’s really the point of the article. Is there something in common with the wars that we don’t do well in that provides lessons for the Army as it thinks to the future?

Host

Let’s unpack that a little bit. What, in your opinion, was the biggest misstep?

(Nagl)

After the Korean War misstep of being unprepared for combat full stop, the United States decided to focus on a particular kind of war. And this argument draws very heavily from the late Russell Weigley. He wrote a book called The American Way of War (The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy), which argues that since the United States became capable of conventional combat—conventional great-power war, according to the standards of the day—that is the kind of war for which it has chosen to prepare. And that worked well for the United States—and the United States Army, in particular—in the First World War, in World War II, after initial readiness problems in the Korean War and in (Operation) Desert Storm.

But there is another kind of war: irregular war—an ironic name because the world has seen much more irregular war than it has seen so-called regular war over the course of human history. Irregular war is called the war of the weak, war of the flea. It’s a war in which the opponents of a great power choose to fight in ways that minimize the advantages of the great power and maximize the advantages of the lesser power in particular—generally, greater staying power for the lesser power. And the United States has chosen not to prepare for that kind of war. I give the Army in particular something of a break on that prior to Vietnam (the Vietnam War). And I argue in my doctoral dissertation—became the book Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife—that the Army learned and got better over the course of the Vietnam War at counterinsurgency, a particular type of irregular war. So I give the Army sort of half marks for that.

But in the wake of the Vietnam War, the United States turned away from irregular war, decided those were bad wars, wars that we weren’t gonna fight anymore. And, unfortunately, the enemy gets a vote. And the real crux of my argument is that no sane opponent of the United States, having seen the extraordinary conventional capability of the United States military, would choose to fight that tooth to tooth, nail to nail. Our enemies are going to choose ways to try to achieve their political objectives without confronting the full might of the American military. That’s what the Viet Cong and, largely, the North Vietnamese did during the Vietnam War to our dismay.

It’s also the path that . . . after the initial reasonably successful invasions, efforts to topple the government of Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq after those conflicts, our opponents chose to fight us in an irregular manner. And that presents a whole series of challenges for the United States military for which we are not optimized. And that may be okay because the cost of losing one of those wars is far, far less than losing a conventional, great-power-versus-great-power war. But it’s still not good.

And so I argue, certainly with passion, and I hope with some degree of resonance that the United States military—an enormous organization, the most powerful organization on the face of the Earth—ought to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, ought to be able to deter conventional war and, at the same time, increase its ability for irregular wars’ capability, its capacity, its understanding of irregular war so that we present our enemies with no chinks in our armors, no Achilles’ heel, and no place to take us on where their chances of success are any kind of good at all.

Host

Where could we have succeeded if given more time, or maybe if things were executed differently?

(Nagl)

Counterfactuals are always difficult, of course. I’m a big fan of a man named Lewis Sorley who goes by Bob, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, student of the Vietnam War, and biographer of Creighton Abrams, who believes that a choice as simple as one that the President Lyndon Johnson confronted when he was choosing the commander in Vietnam as that war heated up, as we moved toward full engagement in the Vietnam War, when he chose General (William) Westmoreland rather than General Abrams as the commander—Bob argues that a choice as simple as that might have made a difference in the Vietnam War, in an extraordinarily costly war.

Bob has studied Vietnam (the Vietnam War) more extensively than I have. He served in it. I’m not willing to argue with him. I do think there are a number of points during the Vietnam War which we could have made choices that would have rendered that campaign more successful. The bitter irony is that by the end of the war, under Creighton Abrams, we had achieved what looked like success in these irregular wars—that is, a host-nation security force that is able to confront the forces that oppose it with some degree of American support—in particular, American airpower—and that combining and Joint force of host-nation security forces, American airpower, American advisers on the ground can guarantee the survival of the government against any conceivable enemy. We had actually reached that point by the end of the Vietnam War. But it didn’t matter. The American people had lost faith in the war. For some reason, it’s connected to the war; for other reasons, connected to the Nixon administration.

And so we ended that advisory effort, and unbelievable suffering resulted in Vietnam, but also in Cambodia next door, as a result of our failures to learn and adapt rapidly enough to the demands of counterinsurgency in Vietnam. Therefore, recent counterinsurgency campaigns—there’s a whole lot we could have done. We could have prepared better for that part of the spectrum of conflict, we could have created host-nation security advisory forces earlier ...

The military profession needs to be redefined by examination of its expertise and jurisdictions of practice, whereas previously the focus was on securing its professional identity. Twenty years ago, the original Future of the Army Profession research project responded to growing concerns among officers that the Army was no longer a profession in light of the post–Cold War drawdown and the onset of global operations including Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, the profession faces recurrent challenges raised by the changing character of war, the renewal of great-power competition, crises surrounding issues of sexual harassment and assault, the effects of a major global pandemic and associated social and political unrest, and the growing societal distrust toward professions in general. Richard Lacquement and Thomas Galvin propose that the questions of professional identity, while still important, are now less salient than those about the professions’ jurisdictions of practice and domains of expert knowledge. Clarifying them will help better prepare US military professionals to exercise discretionary judgment effectively. They also propose a new Future of the US Military Profession research effort that addresses these jurisdictions across service, joint, and defense enterprises to clarify the divisions of professional work and responsibilities. This is a must-read for any steward of the military profession.

Read the monograph: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/945/

Keywords: leadership, character, effectiveness, self-awareness

Episode Transcript: “Framing the Future of the US Military Profession”

Stephanie Crider (Host)

Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.

The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

Decisive Point welcomes, Dr. Richard Lacquement and Dr. Thomas P. Galvin, authors of Framing the Future of the US Military Profession, published by the US Army War College Press in January 2022. Lacquement is a research professor at the (US Army) War College Strategic Studies Institute, and Galvin is an associate professor at the (US) Army War College.

Welcome to Decisive Point, Richard and Tom. I hear your piece won the Madigan award at the (US) Army War College. Congratulations! That’s really exciting.

(Richard Lacquement)

Thank you.

(Thomas Galvin)

Thank you.

Host

I’m really glad to have you here today. Let’s talk about your monograph. This piece builds on previous work. Give our listeners some background and tell us about the original project from 2002 and 2005, please.

(Lacquement)

Sure. I want to shout out to one of our former professors here at the (US) Army War College, Dr. Don Snider, who had also worked at West Point (Academy) for many years, who was the lead of what was called the “Future of the Army Profession project.” It ended up with two edited volumes that came out in 2002 (first edition) and then in 2005. And I had been fortunate to join a group: probably about two to three dozen scholars who all worked on different elements of what is the US Army profession, partly dealing with the post-Cold War challenges coming out of the 90s and right about the time we went into what became the Global War on Terror (war on terrorism).

And I had been part of that project, and, looking back on it with Don Snider a few years ago, we thought it could use an update based on . . . it’s been over 15 years, and—oh, by the way though, the project was focused on the US Army—our sense was that it really applied to the entire US military; we wanted to broaden the scope to do that.

So, once I got the chance to go on sabbatical, I sort of took that as my sabbatical project to help build it out and recruited Tom. I’m a political scientist, and then Tom worked in our Department of Command, Leadership, and Management and studied the sociology more. And I really needed that perspective on how to understand the evolution and how professions are understood and studied to help flesh out how we would apply that going on 15 to 20 years after the Future Army Profession project, which had used a cortex by Andrew Abbott out of the University of Chicago. That’s very solid but couldn’t do everything we would like it to do as we thought about the whole profession.

Host

Thanks, Richard. Tom?

(Galvin)

I came into the project at Richard’s invitation because I had done some work in studying Abbott and also other related works in organization theory, management science. So that’s the lens that I’m coming into this. There were some . . . what I had always felt were some gaps in the previous work. The previous work is absolutely fantastic in terms of laying out a way of thinking about expert knowledge and how the professions compete, but there were some other things that were not as robustly represented, such as how do the various parts of the military collaborate? Because, at the same time we’re competing, we’re also collaborating. And there was, uh, opportunities to bring in a wider sociological framework to think about the totality of how the military serves as a profession, serves as an organization, and help address some of the emerging problems and challenges that the military faces today.

Host

What gaps does your work seek to fill?

(Lacquement)

So I wanted to identify a few things that we were trying to get at. Tom just talked about some of the literature and how to frame it. But, more importantly, I think in terms of what are the challenges to the US military profession in the United States today? Part of it was the evolution of things that had happened over the last 15 to 20 years—particularly, some of the technological changes bringing in domains of cyberspace and sort of maturity or for the way our understanding of how space affects military operations—how that’s matured. Challenges in terms of actual strategic performance. Looking at events in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and Libya, and unsatisfying strategic outcomes to say the least in what we could do to better articulate what the military should have known better. What should we learn from that, and how do we understand what the expertise of the military is and how that’s evolved because of the changing character of war and the changing international environment? And how to do a better job at sort of, again, expanding from just the Army to the entire US military, but looking at those particularly daunting challenges in the changing character of war, changing strategic context, and also some of the societal demands—diversity, equity, inclusion, gender roles, for example—and how those have evolved. And what does that mean for the military profession going forward?

(Galvin)

I would add that a gap is that the previous work had focused heavily on the operational aspects of the military profession—you know, the expertise in fighting and winning wars—much less on the institutional side. And there’s a lot of important professional work that’s done in terms of running and resourcing the military that hasn’t been as appreciated. There’s also some elements from the research agenda that the 2005 project left, such as, “Should there be a joint profession?” Well, I think, 15 years later, we’re in a better position to answer those kinds of questions. And so, we want to look at not just the services, but also what is the role and function of the Joint layer? What about defense agencies? How does the existence, the growth of those entities put pressure on the services? On the Army as a profession?

And I also believe an important gap, getting back to the point about collaboration, is about how professions . . . we do a lot of boundary spanning. So, we have the Army as a profession, but we also have different communities of practice, which handles certain requirements that the military needs to be able to sustain itself or to be able to perform its mission that cross professional boundaries, such as resource management; such as the special operations community; such as the special professions of military doctors, military lawyers, military chaplains. Those, I think, deserve a treatment because they are a very, very important part of the profession, but their role has not really been explored as much as it could be.

Host

The monograph maps a way forward to three practical outcomes. Will you please briefly explain them for our listeners?

(Lacquement)

Sure. If I were to put a gloss on all three of them, it’s what I described sometimes being kind of an owner’s manual of how to understand the military. My sense is that the word “military” is a pretty big and amorphous one that is misunderstood by many. Either there’s an assumption about a very narrow view of maybe just battle or combat or a very broad one, which gets to that three-million-person organization, the Department of Defense, and everything it does, which goes way beyond just battle and combat. So articulating sort of what it is that the US military does do. What is its expertise? What expertise is kind of unique to the military as well as ones it shares with other professions or other segments of society? So, helping US citizens and members of the military understand what is the military and who are military professionals.

Secondly is civilian leaders—particularly, the ones in the federal government or the government, meaning legislative as well as executive branch. And, really, at the state and national level, to sort of help them understand what t...

Strategic leaders must possess a range of skills to work successfully in complex environments. To use those skills to best effect, they rely on character traits that enhance the likelihood of their effectiveness as leaders and maximize their success when working in teams. Certain character traits facilitate work in demanding settings that rely heavily on communication, integration, and cooperation. Programs designed to educate senior leaders must help future national security professionals identify these character traits and then practice and hone them. Highlighting individuals with challenging roles in World War II, this podcast analyzes the character traits that enabled them to succeed in their work.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss2/14/

Keywords: leadership, character, effectiveness, self-development, self-awareness

Episode Transcript:

Stephanie Crider (Host)

Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.

The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

Decisive Point welcomes Dr. Tami Davis Biddle, author of “Character Traits Strategic Leaders Need,” which was featured in the Parameters summer 2022 issue. Biddle retired as the Elihu Root chair of military studies at the US Army War College, where she’s now a distinguished fellow. She’s written extensively on military history, airpower, and strategy. The author of Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare (2002), she is currently writing Taking Command: The United States in the Second World War for Oxford University Press.

Welcome to Decisive Point, Tami, I’m really glad you’re here.

(Tami Davis Biddle)

I’m delighted to be here, Stephanie. Thank you.

Host

Let’s talk about your article. You open with a statement that might not occur to many people. Security professionals engage in activities that are intensely analytical, but also intensely human. Students of strategy, therefore, must develop an understanding of decision making and its pathologies and must comprehend the role of cognitive psychology in that process. What does this look like in real life?

(Biddle)

This comes out of my experience and teaching for a long time and teaching war college-level students for two decades. And I realized that they have an opportunity at . . . especially at the beginning of the year to stop and really do some intentional thinking about how they process information and about how they think and how they articulate ideas. And one of the things that I think is terribly important is for them to understand the background influences on their thinking; the institutional influences on them; even the influences of other individuals, mentors, family the way that they’ve been brought up to see the world and the way that their experiences have shaped their perception of the world.

Because if they can understand that, they’re in a much better position to think clearly, to think analytically, and to understand where their biases or their predilections or their . . . even their prejudices might be influencing the way that they think about the world and therefore interfering, potentially, with strategic thinking and strategic decisions or analytical thinking.

So I felt it was really important to start students off with a emphasis on greater self-awareness and greater self-awareness about the process of thought and discussion. Understanding those and being able to be aware of those is super important, I think, for students and for helping them to understand how to interact with others and how to do the best possible strategic thinking that gets them sometimes out of their own heads and enables them to see the perspectives of others and develop empathy and to not simply be prisoners to their own biases or their own predilections.

Host

There are so many rich examples in your article. Let’s hit some of the highlights.

(Biddle)

Sure.

Host

Who’s Harry Hopkins? And what qualities did he exemplify?

(Biddle)

Oh, Harry Hopkins is such an interesting character. He was the leading adviser, the closest adviser, and the most trusted adviser to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). They met in 1928 during, basically, FDR’s campaign for the governor of New York, and then they worked together pretty much consistently from that time onward. And of course, when FDR became president, it was in the height of the Great Depression, and the most important thing to do, or he felt that he had to do, was to improve the lives of Americans. To help people who were destitute, who didn’t have work, to try to find useful work to restore their pride, to get the economy back up and on its feet and going again, and to help Americans just basically regain their self-confidence.

And Harry Hopkins was, it turned out, exactly the right man to do that. He thought like the president. He had been basically a social worker. He went to Grinnell College, he came to New York City, he saw people who were struggling on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He became committed to helping them, and then, when the financial crisis occurred, he had some experience. So he was in a perfect position to help the president understand how to move forward.

He became head of the Works Progress Administration and was crucially important in that role, and, also, this was kind of a first for the country. Really, the idea that a state has responsibility for its citizens was still pretty new in the 1920s and 1930s, but it’s an idea that FDR promoted and believed in deeply, and Harry Hopkins shared that belief. And so, they were a great team and they worked together on the New Deal. They tried to restore American confidence and American dignity for working people. And then, when (Adolf) Hitler became the chancellor and then became increasingly powerful in Germany, and then when the Second World War began in Europe, they worked together as a team once more. And they were working in a realm that was fairly new to Hopkins. In particular, he didn’t start out as a foreign policy analyst, but one of his great strengths was to learn quickly and to know exactly what is most important. And he recognized the crisis facing the world because of Hitler and because of fascism was the most important issue.

And he helped FDR keep that uppermost, and then he became a tremendous . . . basically, communicator for FDR. Because the president had polio and because he had limited mobility, he couldn’t often go and do the things that a modern president who has full mobility can do. So Harry Hopkins became the eyes and ears and the arms and the legs of FDR. And he went and met with very important people. He met with (Winston) Churchill early on in January of 1941. This was right after—obviously, Britain had been fighting alone in 1940, and Britain was in pretty desperate straits. The US wasn’t in the war yet, and we were trying to figure out ways—at least, FDR was—trying to figure out ways to help the British. And Hopkins ended up playing a really crucial role in that—figuring out, first of all, that Britain was in fact going to stay in the fight. Essentially, when FDR sent Hopkins over to Britain in 1941, early in ‘41, it was to find out if Britain was going to manage, if Britain was going to be able to stay in the fight, because many Americans like Joseph Kennedy were saying, “No, Britain’s gonna be overrun” or “Britain’s gonna make a deal.” And so, the first thing that Hopkins had to ascertain was is Churchill going to keep this country together? Is it going to keep it fighting? And if we send them materiel, will they be able to use it in the long run? And Hopkins determined that, in fact, Churchill was going to stay in the fight. Britain was going to stay in the fight. And yes, if we sent materiel and became essentially the arsenal of democracy, that Britain would survive. And this became kind of the keystone of this tremendous alliance between the British and the Americans in the Second World War.

So, in a way, he was discerning, like we’ve lately been discerning if Ukraine was going to survive and stay in the fight, and whether it was worth our sending materials and support or whether it would just be taken up by the Russians after a short fight. But, in fact, Churchill and Hawkins formed a very tight bond, and one of the things that Churchill appreciated so much about Hopkins was that he stayed focused on the key issues. He knew what was salient, he knew what was most important, he didn’t waste time. He went right to the key issues, and he figured out how to move forward on those key issues.

When I was evaluating my students, one of the things that I was often looking for was a sense of their ability to discern what is most important. Can they separate the wheat from the chaff? Can they really zero in on what’s key and what’s crucial and move forward and bring others on board and keep them focused on what is most important? And Hopkins did that in spades, and he did it over and over and over again. He traveled with FDR, he went to all the major international conferences and helped the president keep everyone on track. Even when there were huge differences, Harry Hopkins found a way to get people to agree and to simply create good outcomes through determination and through, I think, a certain optimism that he shared with the president.

The president had a confidence that was, oh, just winning and contagious, and this is why I think he was such a successful president in t...

Distilling lessons from the author’s book, The Media Offensive: How the Press and Public Opinion Shaped Allied Strategy during World War II, this podcast provides applicable suggestions for the US military today. As in World War II, the press is both a weapon and a possible vulnerability in modern warfare.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss2/15/

Episode Transcript

Stephanie Crider (Host)

Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

The guests in speaking order on this episode are:

(Guest 1: Alexander G. Lovelace)



Decisive Point welcomes Dr. Alexander G. Lovelace, author of “Tomorrow’s Wars and the Media,” which was featured in the summer 2022 issue of Parameters. Lovelace is a scholar-in-residence at the Contemporary History Institute of Ohio University. His first book, The Media Offensive: How the Press and Public Opinion Shaped Allied Strategy during World War II, is being published by the University Press of Kansas in 2022.

(Host)

It’s great to have you on Decisive Point, Alex. Thanks for making time for us.

(Lovelace)

Thank you for having me.

(Host)

Let’s jump right in. Your essay offers practical suggestions for how the press can be used by public affairs officers, commanders, and policymakers to achieve victory in coming conflicts. You say these lessons are applicable for today’s wars, even when they’re fought on TikTok. So give us some historical context. How did we get here?

(Lovelace)

The Second World War was a media war for two big reasons. The first one is that all sides really tried to harness the media as a weapon during that conflict. This really came out of the philosophical and technological mindset of total war. There’s a real philosophical shift where warfare is suddenly not so much something you do to the enemy army, but also has to involve the enemy population.

That grows from the French Revolution up to World War II, and it’s accompanied also by a technological shift. Warfare is becoming much more deadly, particularly for civilians. At the same time, the media is also part of this change. You have technology such as telegraphs and photography which has a military use but also has a civilian use and a media use for civilian press.

So by World War II, which is the first total war, at least the first one that is openly fought as such, the media is going to play a big role in that. So that’s one reason.

The second reason is even as commanders are trying to use the media as a weapon, they’re also being susceptible to it influencing their decisions on the battlefield. You have these two things: the media as a weapon and the media being used by commanders, influencing commanders’ decisions, and it creates a model of military-media relations which survives total war. We haven’t fought many total wars lately, but, in the era of limited war, the media is still a big factor. Vietnam becomes a television war, and there’s a big debate over how much that influences. But you see this throughout the war on terror (war on terrorism) and up to the current conflict in Ukraine, which some commentators have called a TikTok war because a lot of Americans and a lot of news is being shared on the latest information-sharing platform.

(Host)

Can you explain in a little bit more detail how the news influences commanders’ battlefield decisions?

(Lovelace)

The news really influences commanders’ decisions in, I would say, three big ways.

The first one is maybe the most obvious to Hollywood. It’s the general who’s media-obsessed, wants publicity, wants to make a name for himself, and that’s probably a little less common than one would suppose, but it does happen. The second way that commanders use the press is to create political support for a policy or their theater or campaign. And the third type of influence the press can extract from a commander is more insidious, and that is the commander doesn’t really know it’s happening, or he’s letting it happen because he thinks he has to.

(Host)

Today’s media is different from the press of, let’s say, World War II. And you say that’s OK. How so?

(Lovelace)

I would say there’s two main factors. The first is methodology. The press during World War II is often seen as somewhat more subservient or respectful of authority. Many reporters and news organizations today see themselves as international companies, not necessarily American companies. Exxon’s a massive, worldwide company. CNN is too, so there’s that shift when it comes to methodology.

The second real difference is technology. Today you have 24-hour cable news. You now have a plethora of blogs and Internet sites. The media is very different. I think one way technology really changes how news is reported was the onset of television where editors and paper owners and media company stockholders have a lot less influence when it comes to the editorial opinions of, say, anchormen. Suddenly, Walter Cronkite has a lot more editorial freedom than he might have had if he was just writing for a newspaper and having to get his stories past editors. So that’s one of the big changes. That’s even more different than today; there’s many different news sites, and they tend to be more focused towards specific audiences. There’s a very interesting study the RAND Corporation put out a couple years ago that talked about the focus of how news is becoming more focused towards select groups.

However, one of the big things is that the problems are different, but a lot of the issues are not. One of the big myths of the Second World War is that the press was kind of a lapdog of the government or the military, America was all united, and that wasn’t true at all. There was an opposition press to the Roosevelt administration before and leading up to the entry of the United States into World War II. That doesn’t go away. A lot of military journalists were also free to question the military. I mean, there was censorship, but censorship was not used to prevent criticism.

The press wasn’t necessarily always promilitary during the war. Another thing is that commanders during World War II were also dealing with new technology. They were dealing with radio. They were dealing with newsreels. They were dealing with magazines that dealt with photographs, and they had to learn to adapt to this kind of new technology. Likewise, the speed of news increases during the war.

(Host)

Talk to me about the press as a weapon and TikTok wars.

(Lovelace)

Well, during World War II, the US military tried to use the press as a weapon in several ways. First, they understood that a democracy at war had to have an informed public. They did a lot to encourage reporters. They have accreditation. They do have censorship, but it does tend to be of a fairly mild variety. So an informed population is one.

An informed soldiery is another. A lot of commanders believe American soldiers fight better, particularly when it’s a draft Army, when they know what they’re fighting for. So there’s also a big effort to get news to soldiers. Some commanders, George Patton is one, also tried to get news of ordinary soldiers back to hometown papers and to praise subordinates in the press in a big way. And the Army near the end of the war eventually catches on and begins institutionalizing that.

And there’s some attempts to use the press for deception during D-Day. It’s funny to see how the final announcement is worded: “Landing has begun on the northern coast of France.” Well, what does that mean?

There’s another way that the press is used and that is to not necessarily always give good news. By 1943, George Marshall and others in the military are worried that the American people are going to take the war for granted—that it’s already been won and we can sort of slack off. And Marshall and the Pentagon begin trying to make sure that bad news isn’t hidden. Mid-1943, they begin releasing pictures of dead American servicemen to show that the war’s still pretty serious.

Now, that’s World War II. Let’s talk about TikTok. TikTok is, first of all, not a social media app. There’s not a whole lot that is social about it. It’s an information-sharing platform. Now, the information might be goofy videos, but it also can be news, and some of it, I would argue, is somewhat sinister.

And I would say that for three reasons. Last September in 2021, the schools across the United States were hit by something called a TikTok challenge called ”devious licks,” in which the challenge was to vandalize your school’s bathroom or steal something and then videotape yourself doing this on TikTok. I couldn’t find any estimates of how much damage this caused. It must have been well within the millions of dollars. There were many arrests of children.

It shows just how powerful this app is, and it’s powerful for a number of reasons. How it works is it’s trying to figure out what you like so you can go on and you see these short little videos. And if you linger on one, TikTok knows it. It will try to feed you more videos like that.

Out of professional obligation, I opened TikTok for an hour. I decided I was going to try to see how fast I could get on stuff with Ukraine. It opens up, you see a goofy video. You see another goofy video. I found something with gas prices, I lingered there. I found something else on gas pri...

This podcast discusses drone swarms, which can be used at sea, on land, in the air, and even in space, are fundamentally information-dependent weapons. No study to date has examined drone swarms in the context of information warfare writ large. This article explores the dependence of these swarms on information and the resultant connections with areas of information warfare—electronic, cyber, space, and psychological—drawing on open-source research and qualitative reasoning. Overall, the article offers insights into how this important emerging technology fits into the broader defense ecosystem and outlines practical approaches to strengthening related information warfare capabilities.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss2/13/

Keywords: unmanned systems, electronic warfare, information warfare, cyberwarfare, drone swarms

Episode Transcript

Stephanie Crider (Host)

Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.

The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast guest, and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

(Guest 1: Zachary Kallenborn)

(Host)

Decisive Point welcomes Zachary Kallenborn, author of “InfoSwarms: Drone Swarms and Information Warfare,” which was featured in the summer 2022 issue of Parameters. Kallenborn is a policy fellow at the Schar School of Policy and Government, a research affiliate of the Unconventional Weapons and Technology program at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism), a senior consultant at ABS Group, and a self-proclaimed US Army “mad scientist.” He is the author of publications on autonomous weapons, drone swarms, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction.

Zach, I’m glad you’re here. Thanks for making time to chat with me today.

(Kallenborn)

Thanks for having me.

(Host)

Your article explores the dependence of drone swarms on information and the resultant connections with areas of information warfare—electronic, cyber, space, and psychological warfare—drawing on open-source research and qualitative reasoning. Put this in context for us, please.

(Kallenborn)

The context of the discussion is looking at drone swarms—a rapidly emerging technology that numerous states are developing. Obviously got the big players—China, Russia, the United States are all developing this technology. But even smaller powers, like South Africa. And this technology is even already being used in combat. We saw just last year that Israel used a drone swarm in combat in the fight against Gaza. Now, before jumping into these sort of larger issues of information warfare, it’s important to understand briefly what we mean by “drone swarm” here.

We’re not necessarily talking about simply large numbers of drones used en masse, which is often how the term is used within media, but really what we’re talking about is drones that have some level of communication and coordination between them so that they’re operating effectively as a singular unit instead of, say, 10, 15 individual drones.

Now, what that means is there’s potentially a range of capability within that. Because if we’re talking about simply coordination and communication at the basic level, that’s a pretty simple thing. So in the case of like the Israel example, likely all they’re really doing is just doing some coordinated searches over an area to help identify a target. It’s not anything all that fancy or unusual, but we can imagine in the future how artificial intelligence and autonomy may make coordination communication fairly significant. You could imagine, for example, a drone swarm that’s made up of multiple different types of drones operating in different domains with different types of payloads where they’re intelligently selecting, like, “Alright, let’s use this antitank weapon against this identified tank over here, and we’re going to send our antipersonnel weapons to this infantry unit over here,” and collectively sort of adapt and engage with the reality on the ground working across multiple domains, and all autonomously.

But the important thing, and what we’re going to get at in this article, is that regardless of that complexity, one of the key issues when it comes to drone swarms is information warfare, and, particularly, their dependence on those various subsets: electronic, cyber, space, and psychological warfare.

(Host)

Let’s start with electronic warfare. Electronic jamming: What do we need to know?

(Kallenborn)

We can start with individual drones because that’s the simple example here. One of the things that we’ve seen is that electronic jamming has been a really common form of attempting to defeat that system—namely, because drones typically rely on some sort of communication signal between the operator and the actual drone platform itself. So the idea is if you sever that communication link, then the drone may not necessarily be able to operate at all.

And that problem scales extensively when we talk about drone swarms because, necessarily, you have that same problem. You have an operator who has to send links and information to that swarm. But it becomes more complicated because to get at that point, the key issue of swarming is that communication and coordination between the different drones, which means you have another opportunity to jam, and, particularly, that inner-swarm communication. Because if you break down that communication, the notion of a swarm stops being meaningful.

Now one of the open questions, though, is how exactly that works in practice. Based on the way that the algorithms work from having, say, a dedicated leader—that sort of helping organize things to massively decentralized approaches—to having different communication pathways through a complex network. So how exactly jamming might work in practice may vary a lot.

And of course, if we’re talking about multidomain swarms where you start getting undersea drones interacting with surface vehicles, that becomes more complicated. But, nonetheless, the notion of jamming signals is equally appropriate there.

(Host)

What about cyber? What do we need to know?

(Kallenborn)

There is sort of a silly depiction, but I think it has some seriousness to it, of drones as sort of flying computers. And in a sense, that’s what they are. They’re kind of onboard systems that manage all aspects of the drone’s flight from specific flight controllers that manage the propellers and the various movement and the habitation of that system.

And when we start talking about drone swarms, that’s even more the case because you now have algorithms and systems to manage that broader communication, that coordination, the broader behavior of that swarm, so that at a very basic level, you may have—say, for example, task allocation algorithms to say, like, “OK, these drones are going over here, these drones are going over here, these drones are going to do this, those drones are going to do that.” And that’s a very cyber-based system, which of course means that it also creates vulnerabilities in the cyberspace for those systems.

So what happens if you have cyberattacks aimed at the systems that control the flight controllers? What happens if you attempt to manipulate those? You could get all sorts of problems, from the drones not operating correctly to crashing into one another, and you can imagine other types of cyber activities.

So, for example, if you’re using artificial intelligence-based machine vision in the swarm to help navigate the world around it, that could potentially be manipulated through cyber means by, for example, it manipulating the training data that goes into creating those machine vision systems through what are called, “(artificial intelligence or) AI poisoning attacks.” Conversely, you can also imagine using cyber to, say, again, break that link between the operator and the actual system itself. Except, rather than using . . . jamming the actual signal, you are manipulating the system that is actually responding and taking in those orders. And then, at an extreme level, you could imagine cyber being used to actively take control of and manipulate the swarm, which is perhaps the scariest, where your friendly swarm is now turned against you and destroying your own military forces, which could be quite bad.

(Host)

What about space warfare and the Global Navigation Satellite System? How do they relate to drone swarms?

(Kallenborn)

Yeah, so, there’s a couple dimensions to it. Firstly, there’s obviously the communication element. At the moment, most of the drone swarms are very sort of tactical, very short-range type operations. But as we start scaling, you could potentially look and need satellite-based communication to relay some of those signals. Likewise, we know that, at least at the moment, many of these drone swarms are heavily dependent on global position navigation, a positioning system for navigation timing. Basically, they need to understand where are they potentially located in space?

Now that’s one place where technology is developing, and there has been work on using a more autonomous, image-based recognition to help the swarm actually navigate. But, at the moment, there’s a close dependence on (the Global Positioning System or) GPS. But how exactly that works is again going to be very dependent on the nature of the s...

This podcast examines faits accomplis—how states attempt to seize disputed territory using military force, hoping to avoid war in the process—and offers suggestions for how to deter them. Since 1945, faits accomplis have become the most common means by which states attempt to take over territory, even though they frequently result in armed conflict. US deterrent efforts, however, often focus on stopping invasions, not limited land grabs. This study combines the traditional literature on deterrence with Dan Altman’s recent research on faits accomplis to suggest Department of Defense leaders should frame territorial disputes as a real estate market they can both analyze and manipulate.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss2/12/

Keywords: Russia, Ukraine, gray zone, territorial disputes, brinkmanship

Episode Transcript

Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.

The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast guest and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

The guests in speaking order on this episode are:

(Guest 1: Brandon Colas)

(Host)

Decisive Point welcomes Mr. Brandon Colas, author of “Defining and Deterring Faits Accomplis,” which was featured in the Summer 2022 issue of Parameters. Colas is anArmy officer [unintelligible] currently embedded with the United Kingdom Strategic Command Intelligence Center in London as a liaison officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Welcome to Decisive Point, Brandon. It’s great to have this chance to chat with you. Let’s talk about your article, “Defining and Deterring Faits Accomplis.” This study combines the traditional literature of deterrence with Dan Altman’s recent research on faits accomplis to suggest Department of Defense leaders should frame territorial disputes as taking part in a real-estate market that they can both analyze and manipulate to discourage our opponents from conquering without conquest.

What does this look like? Please give us an outline here.

(Colas)

So when I started this research, I began with Tom Schelling (Thomas C. Schelling) and his 1968 classic and, in a lot of ways, Schelling—even though his book is breezy, it’s academic lectures that he’s talking about. It really has defined the US deterrence discussion ever since.

And so Schelling talks about brute force and coercion. And so, brute force—we used to think like (Adolf) Hitler, Poland 1940, right? And coercion would be just building up those forces on the border until the other side caves and gives up their territory or makes those concessions that you’re wanting.

So again, going back to Hitler, you think about him entering Denmark unopposed, right? So those are sort of the two classic examples. But more recent international relations research, especially led by Dan Altman, who’s at Georgia State (University), has looked at small, limited territorial seizures. He calls them faits accomplis, so there’s limited territory that’s disputed. There’s the use of military force, but the aggressor statement still attempts to avoid war in the process. And what’s interesting, Altman goes back from 1945 to present, and he discovers that there’s only four cases of brute force actually being used to seize territory since then. And so that’s when one state again uses their military to completely absorb another state. And those cases—some of them succeeded, like North and South Vietnam. Some of them failed, like Iraq and Kuwait, but it’s actually not that common. And he finds that coercion for seizing wholesale seizure of territory is actually even less common.

So you have this sort of contradiction where you think about words as being caused by territorial conflict, and yet major territorial conflict doesn’t take place. And that’s where Altman looks at faits accomplis and discovers that there’s 65 cases post-1945 of limited use of military force to seize limited territory, like land grabs.

So the classic example is Russia in the Crimea in 2014. It’s just striking, looking back on it, how much Ukraine loses there: It’s 10,000 square miles of territory, two million citizens, pretty much all of their navy. And yet there’s only one Ukrainian casualty.

And so yes, there was some violence involved. All the violence was latent, but it was there. But at the end of the day, this is not a traditional invasion that we think of. It was a fait accompli.

Or we think about China in the South China Sea or the East China Sea that’s like building islands in the middle of nowhere to expand their territory again. There’s violence involved there. They have military defenses placed on these, and yet we don’t really know quite how to deter this or how to handle it. And so that’s what I wanted to study in this article is: How do we frame these limited uses of the military to seize limited pieces of territory, and then how do we deter them? It doesn’t seem like it’s big enough to go to war over, and yet it’s still something that needs to be stopped.

(Host)

That leads right into my next question: Explain the calculus of determining the desirability of faits accomplis. How do states seize territory?

(Colas)

I wanted to think about why they would seize territory at a particular time. A fait accompli might be something gradualist and slow, or it might be something really kind of quick, like Russia in the Crimea. But what are the factors that would make a state want to seize a piece of disputed territory? And in the article, I came up with the idea of this territory as a sort of real-estate market where you have two opposing states that are looking at this territory, and each state values the territory a little bit differently. But what they have in common is that they don’t want to go to a full-scale war to seize the territory. That’s why the territories are disputed. But that’s also why it isn’t resolved yet.

And so, as I was thinking about that, I wanted to also ask the question of what factors could change to make a state decide, “Now is the time to risk going to war to seize this territory” or “Now still isn’t the time.” And so that’s where I looked at the idea of states factor in the cost of war if they’re going to seize the territory, and I think states would be planning for the worst-case scenario: What happens if they try to seize the territory and end up losing? The second is just the probability of war. Can they actually move in like Russia did in Crimea and not go to war? And then the probability of victory gives them war. So if it does come down to a fight, are they going to win and get this territory at the end? And so the market model isn’t really asking how they see the territory so much as why they seize the territory at a particular time. What are those factors?

(Host)

Can you talk a little bit more about the model that you offer in your article and just walk us through how that works?

(Colas)

Thinking about how states are looking at the probability of war, the probability of victory, and then also the cost of war, I thought of four factors that states both influence for themselves and try to shape for other states’ perceptions. The first is going to be historical claims. States make historical claims on territory in order to show that they value the territory.

You look at like China’s claims for the South China Sea. They end up going back to this kind of questionable 1947 map. And then, in 2016, they ended up saying they actually found a book that was 500 years old that really proved this has always been Chinese. And then, when the BBC tried to go interview the person who had found the book, they actually had lost the book. So there’s all these crazy historical claims, but states still make them because it’s a signal. It doesn’t convince anybody. I mean, it might convince people within the state itself; it doesn’t convince anybody else though. But it’s a signal that things matter. And you look at (Vladimir) Putin’s crazy essay in July of last year where he talks about how Russia and Ukraine have always been one people. It’s this horrifically boring tone. You can’t follow his logic or his reasoning, but it’s a signal that this matters to Putin. And so, states do this all the time.

And one thing we should think about, too, is even with our allies, if they’re not making claims about these territories that they are in dispute over, like Japan and the Senkaku Islands (Diaoyu Islands) against China—if our allies aren’t making the same sort of kind of tedious, tendentious historical claims, it’s a signal that perhaps it’s not actually that important to them.

So these historical claims do matter not because they convince people, but because they show a measure of conviction by a state and its leaders. The second and third both affect the cost of war for a state. The first is obviously military modernization and military developments. If you have a better military, the cost of war is likely to go down for you. It’s likely to increase for your opponents. So that’s something that states need to watch: As another state increases the quality capabilities of its military, it could make them more likely to be aggressive because the cost is less for them.

Another way we can affect the cost of war is looking at the possibility of broadening the quarrel. The focal point here is disputed territories. But when a state brings in other matters into the quarrel, it can make it a lot harder to justify war for this particular territory. So by one example—this i...

This podcast argues shortfalls in the international institutions governing the Arctic have allowed Russia and China to expand control over the region. It provides an overview of regional governance and power dynamics, outlines a three-part approach to correcting deficiencies, highlights attempts by Russia and China to circumvent international governance, examines how the Arctic’s governing institutions address Russian and Chinese growth in the region, and focuses on the institutional failures that have allowed Russia and China to expand—failures academic scholarship and US policy have not adequately addressed. Practitioners will find specific steps for rectifying issues with Arctic institutions to support the United States’ interests in the region.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss2/11/

Keywords: Russia, geopolitics, Artic, hybrid warfare, geo-economics, gray-zone warfare

Episode Transcript

Stephanie Crider (Host)

Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.

The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

The guests in speaking order on this episode are:

(Guest 1: Mark T. Vicik)

(Host)

Decisive Point welcomes US Army Captain Mark T. Vicik, author of “Strengthen Arctic Governance to Stop Russian and Chinese Overreach,” which featured in the summer 2022 issue of Parameters. Vicik is a student at the Military Intelligence Captains Career Course at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. He holds a bachelor-of-arts degree in international relations and Middle East and North Africa studies from the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. He conducts research on and writes about Arctic great-power dynamics and security issues and is the author of “The Future Arenas of Great Power Competition,” which was published in The SAIS Review of International Affairs.

Mark, I’m glad you’re here. Let’s talk about Arctic governance. Observers often credit effective intergovernmental organizations like the Arctic Council and universally respected international agreements like the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea with maintaining this prolonged period of cooperation in the Arctic. American policymakers have consistently relied on the maintenance of this rules-based order as foundational for their national security strategy in the Arctic. How does Arctic governance currently work?

(Vicik)

Yeah, so, first off, thanks so much, Stephanie, for having me on and letting me share my work. It’s been such a privilege working with you and the teams at Parameters and Decisive Point. So the broad umbrella of what we call Arctic governance includes a variety of agreements that regulate activity in the region. The two that I highlight in my work are the ones that are most often cited by policymakers and academics as indicative of this spirit of cooperation that I look at kind of critically assessing questions about my work. But those two are the (United Nations or) UN Convention on the Law of the Sea or UNCLOS and the Arctic Council.

Looking in some detail at those two institutions, in 2008, in Ilulissat, Greenland, the five Arctic littoral states—Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia, and the US—met and pledged to adhere to the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas (UN Convention on the Law of the Sea) to regulate territorial claims in the Arctic. This would give countries the right to exercise sovereignty to 12 nautical miles off their coastline as well as rights to exploring and exploiting resources up to 200 miles off their continental shelf and their exclusive economic zone. Any disputes to these territorial claims are supposed to be resolved through the UN Convention on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf).

Looking at the Arctic Council, it’s a multinational organization focused on improving conditions in the region. It provides a platform for Arctic states, indigenous groups, and interested observers to discuss issues like environmental protection, sustainable resource use, and human development. Russia, as an Arctic state, is one of the permanent members—and, as of 2021, is actually the chair, a position that rotates permanent members every two years. So, they’ll be in seat from 2021 to 2023. And China holds observer status.

Again, it’s frequently cited as one of the defining features to suggest this region’s atypically successful multinational governance.

(Host)

It looks like things might be changing, though. How do Russia and China fit into the Arctic dynamic looking forward?

(Vicik)

Speaking generally, Russia has a deep cultural connection to the region and has historically been one of the major players in international Arctic politics. To state the obvious, it has the largest Arctic territory of any state. It’s a key member of the Arctic Council and has historically had a pretty effective military capacity in its far north.

Since 2001, though, it’s really been rapidly expanding its military and economic presence in the region. It established the Northern Fleet Joint Strategic Command in 2014, and its 2008 (Foundations of the Russian Federation’s) State Policy for the Arctic (until 2021 and beyond) identified Arctic energy and mineral deposits as its strategic resource base for the future.

China, on the other hand, is lacking that historical connection to the region, so it’s been scrambling to artificially craft a foothold there as it increasingly acknowledges the region’s potential for future commercial activity. It’s been referring to itself as “a near-Arctic power,” which, I should note, the US government has referred to this title as nonsense (rightfully so).

More concretely, it’s been trying to work its way into Arctic governing institutions, primarily through scientific research. So it established the Yellow River Scientific Research Station on the Svalbard Islands in 2004, and, in 2013, that helped it get observer status in the Arctic Council. They’ve been using this scientific footprint to increasingly expand their economic—and, potentially, in the near future, military—capacity in the region. It’s been funding large infrastructure projects in various Arctic states, to include, in large part, Russia.

Talking specifically about my work, I argue that over the last decade or two, Russia and China have been deliberately exploiting shortfalls in Arctic governing institutions in order to increase their control in the region.

Regarding the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas (UN Convention on the Law of the Sea), there are two major, unresolved issues, the first being the Lomonosov Ridge, the second being the status of the North Sea Route (Northern Sea Route)—both of which Russia and China have been capitalizing to increase their control of the region.

Looking at the Lomonosov Ridge, it’s a roughly 1,100-mile-long underwater feature on the Arctic Sea floor that is likely quite resource-rich. In 2001, Russia submitted their first claim for its inclusion into their exclusive economic zone under UNCLOS. Since then, its claims have been rejected multiple times as scientifically insufficient. The ridge’s status still remains in dispute between various Arctic powers. In a 2007, though, we saw Russia send a deep-sea submersible to plant the national flag on the seabed there, which was an early indication that, without a clear ruling from the UN, they consider that space to be Russian territory—or, at the very least, space that they can and will attempt to exploit for resources.

The second issue pertains to the North Sea Route (Northern Sea Route), which is one of the key maritime transitways through Arctic waters, along with the Northwest Passage and the Transpolar Sea Route. It runs along Russia’s northern coastline. And with year-round ice coverage in the region increasingly shrinking due to climate change, it offers a potentially critical new commercial artery between East Asia and Europe.

Currently, the route’s status—that is, whether it’s classified as international waters or as a Russian internal waterway—remains ambiguous under UNCLOS. But Russia has been increasingly imposing constraints on foreign vessels attempting to navigate through the passageway. And additionally, they’ve been developing infrastructure fairly aggressively along that route, often with significant support from China via their Belt and Road Initiative.

Looking at the Arctic Council, its charter bans any discussion on military matters. Forums like the Arctic Security Forces Roundtable and the Northern (European) Chiefs of Defense used to partially fill this gap. But since 2014, Russia has been excluded from those venues based on their aggression in Crimea. And of course, China plays no role in them either. Economically, the Arctic Council has a pretty well-established norm of focusing on safe and noncontroversial issues, which has left these massive Sino-Russian infrastructure projects that increasingly define activity in the region as outside the purview of the Arctic Council.

So you can see that as developing military capacity and large-scale commercial operations increasingly define our adversaries’ activities in the region, Russia and China are able to continue to participate in following this rules-based international order while continuing to expand control of the region largely unchecked and outside the lens of multinational organizations.

(Host)

In your artic...

This podcast assesses the American-Russian economic relationship, identifying how Russia exploits strategic asymmetries to gain advantage in the space below armed conflict and how the United States can modernize its economic statecraft. It draws upon a wide range of comparative research, from US-Russian military thought to the American-Eurasian economic interrelationship, to evaluate the full range of economic statecraft within a single dyad of countries in the context of coercion theory. This analysis will assist American policymakers in reforming priorities and processes according to principles of economic statecraft to sustain ongoing American coercion and set conditions for advantage upon the return to bilateral competition.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss2/10/

Keywords: Russia, geopolitics, hybrid warfare, geo-economics, economic statecraft, gray-zone warfare​

Episode Transcript

Stephanie Crider (Host)

Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.

The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

The guests in speaking order on this episode are:

(Guest 1: Ryan J. Orsini)

(Host)

Decisive Point welcomes Major Ryan J. Orsini, author of “Economic Statecraft and US-Russian Policy,” which was featured in the summer 2022 issue of Parameters. Orsini is a US Army infantry officer assigned as a student at the Command and Staff General College (Command and General Staff College) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He holds a master of public policy degree from Georgetown University. Ryan, I’m glad you’re here. Thanks for joining me today. Let’s talk about the US, Russia, and economic statecraft. Please lay the groundwork for us. What is your working definition of economic statecraft for this scenario?

(Orsini)

Thank you for the question. Thank you for having me. So, put simply, economic statecraft is the use of a nation’s economic means in pursuit of either geopolitical or domestic goals. That’s everything from trade policy, industrial policy, sanctions—it’s a big bucket. Now, here, I address a small portion. So I’m speaking, specifically, the US-Russian dyad and a particular spot on the conflict spectrum: the gray zone, the space between peace and war.

But, really, I’m addressing two fundamental questions: first, how Russia uses its economic means, both licit and illicit, to sort of punch above its weight class and garner international influence, extracting these gains despite US deterrence policy and overall advantage in economic means. And then I ask, “What can the US do to leverage the economic instrument and really achieve the coercion it desires?” So I put forward the policy recommendation of domestic coordination, international cooperation, and transatlantic transparency.

(Host)

Well, let’s break it down. Walk us through them. Let’s start with domestic coordination. What needs to happen here?

(Orsini)

So US economic statecraft—it often lacks unity of effort. Its authorities and its resources are spread across branches of government and the interagency. What does this look like in practice? Well, first, it’s organization. Identifying a lead agency or task force. There are lots of options. I propose some, but, really, this agency serves a couple critical roles: assessing the changing Russian vulnerabilities to US economic leverage over time, evaluating the effectiveness of US policy over time, and ensuring that coordination across the interagency of the statecraft.

Second is priority. Unlike in the defense community, there is no overriding document. There’s no national defense strategy guiding the economic tool. And also it’s about economic lines of effort. For instance, in this new era of great-power competition, how do we prioritize counterauthoritarian influence operations versus counterthreat finance?

These are guiding principles that can really help guide the overall economic instrument. And, finally, it’s process: creating the legal mechanisms that the interagency can use to enforce antimoney laundering in the modern age to protect both privacy and access to data that it needs to be effective on today’s global stage.

(Host)

International cooperation: What does that look like in your plan?

(Orsini)

I’m looking in particular since the 2014 Crimean crisis. And if you look in the snapshot, the US economic statecraft has often lacked the broad international enforcement or has failed to maintain it over time. And, ultimately, this dilutes or nullifies intended effects of economic statecraft. So what does this look like? Really, it’s working with like-minded international bodies, political, economic, intelligence agencies. And the key is to work within the current overall Eurasian politic.

So I offer a mix of positive and negative economic inducements. We often forget that economic statecraft is also positive inducements—how to prioritize sanctions and sanctions relief. And, ultimately, the big goal here is to align the incentive structures and build resilience for other states from Russian influence.

(Host)

Your final point was transparency, and I need to point out it’s not just about dollars and rubles exclusively. This included Bitcoin, (Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges or) INSTEX, the central-bank digital currencies, and you also mentioned the US Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020. Can you walk us through this part of your plan?

(Orsini)

So data might not quite be the new oil per se, but it really is the key to understanding Russian influence as well as how effective American statecraft can be against it. And you offered a bunch of mechanisms by which Russia can exploit these blurry legal and financial structures. And that starts here in the US.

We have a myriad of antimoney-laundering laws that help define beneficial ownership across economic transactions. I point to plenty of potential legislation or legislation that is in execution right now.

And why is it transatlantic? Well, the hub of international finance still runs a lot through New York City, London, and Brussels. So at end state, it’s about building actionable attribution and accountability. And these mechanisms within the international community—we can really garner a lot of influence just within our like-minded partners.

(Host)

Before we go, do you have any final thoughts?

(Orsini)

Knowing the readers of Parameters, I’d like to bring this idea of consolidating gains to making temporary advantage enduring. And, you know, there is a nonmilitary aspect to the American way of war. The economic tool usually shapes, and it usually translates advantage into some enduring outcome. But we often build it around a military action. I’d encourage the listeners, wherever you are in the interagency and whatever instrument you are a part of—think about how your piece can support this economic tool. It’s not normally how we think of it, but in a world where deterrence is really our largest contribution, it may be how we focus going forward, and this is a place where Russia has had success. It’s a playbook that they can bring off the shelf and utilize. And so, pending the results of ongoing conflict, it’s something they might likely go back to. It behooves us to look at this environment and shape it while there is a policy opportunity here now.

(Host)

Thank you, Ryan. Listeners, you can read this article, “Economic Statecraft and US-Russian Policy,” to get details about how Russia exploits strategic asymmetries to gain advantage in the space below armed conflict and how the United States can modernize its economic statecraft. Visit press.armywarcollege.edu. Look for volume 52, issue 2.

If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, look for us on Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or any other major podcasting platform.

Author information:

Major Ryan J. Orsini, US Army, is an infantry officer assigned as a student at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He holds a master of public policy degree from Georgetown University.

In this podcast, Colonel George Shatzer, director of the Strategy Research and Analysis Department of the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College, discusses books of relevance to US Joint planners and strategists, as well as those of allies and strategic partners. He applies his experience and education as a US Army senior strategist to extract insights useful to anyone contemplating how to confront the challenges of today’s strategic environment.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss2/16/

Keywords: NATO, Russia, Ukraine, integrated warfare, Russian military theory

Episode Transcript

Stephanie Crider (Host)

Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.

The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast guest, and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

The guests in speaking order on this episode are:

(Guest 1: George Shatzer)

(Host)

Decisive Point welcomes Colonel George Shatzer, director of the Strategic Research and Analysis Division in the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College. Colonel Shatzer authors the (Strategic Research and Analysis Division or) SRAD Director’s Corner in Parameters. In the 2022 summer issue, he covers Russia and Ukraine.

SRAD Director’s Corner is relatively new to Parameters. In it, you review books of possible interest to contemporary military strategists—especially, those serving in US Army and Joint positions. The summer issue contains the second installment of this section, and the focus is on Russia and Ukraine. Thanks for being here.

(Shatzer)

Well, thanks for the opportunity to discuss the article and this important issue.

(Host)

This conflict has not unfolded the way many people thought it would. Your piece emphasizes the value of knowing your enemy, and how it’s a pathway to understanding oneself and the kind of war on which we’re embarking. It’s through this lens that your reviews are written.

(Shatzer)

That’s right. As I mentioned in the article, the day-to-day demands of commanders, leaders, and strategists to ensure our nation’s security can be all-consuming. There are endless demands on time when you are preparing to deter war or to be ready for it, and those demands are mostly internal or focused on ourselves. Even with the assistance of very dedicated intelligence professionals, it can be easy for decisionmakers and strategists to lose sight of the adversary’s views or motivations.

So, taking the time to read works such as those that I profile in the review series can help us build insight on what the adversary is thinking.

(Host)

How does Oscar Jonsson’s The Russian Understanding of War: Blurring the Lines between War and Peace inform this topic?

(Shatzer)

Jonsson’s book was fascinating. I really appreciated how thoroughly he built a case through his review of pre-Soviet, Soviet, and modern Russian military writings and doctrine. He argues that the current Russian view of the very nature of war, not just its character, has fundamentally changed.

In brief, Jonsson asserts that Russian leaders and security professionals believe that the US and the West have become so expert in information and psychological warfare that the nature of war is no longer defined by armed violence. Instead, they believe that the nature of modern warfare is defined by political and social subversion and that these means now have effects akin to those of armed force, when you consider what subversion campaigns have done to governments recently.

And what the Russians are referring to, of course, are the so-called “color revolutions” in the early 2000s, particularly in countries such as Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and Belarus, but also in the Arab Spring events in the Mideast in 2011. What most in the West saw as populist grassroots movements by oppressed peoples to demand a voice in their otherwise corrupt governments, the Russians saw as coordinated subversion campaigns engineered by the US and the West to overthrow legitimate governments and trample traditional social values in those countries. And, more broadly, the Russians view these movements as the opening moves of a campaign—an undeclared war, in effect, by the US and the West intended to destroy the Russian state and nation as they exist today.

So understanding this perspective is important for a couple of reasons, I think. First, it clarifies the motivations for the current Russian war in Ukraine. From the point of view that Russia is defending itself against an undeclared US and Western war, then most any action is justified. In fact, Russia has been very open for many years now, well before its 2014 intervention in Ukraine (the Ukraine crisis), that Ukraine is in essence a vital national interest for Russia. And Russia has been clear that it would act to defend its security interest there—namely, the ethnic Russian people that live in Ukraine and the territory of Ukraine that borders the Russian state, which is also, in Russia’s view anyway, actually the land of the larger Russian nation.

There are also a host of other factors that make Ukraine important to Russia that I mentioned in the article—chiefly, the agricultural and industrial capacity there as well as the Black Sea coast. So this all gets to the second reason why the Russian perspective is important to consider: It gives us a better sense of Russia’s commitment to their so-called “special military operation” there.

A lot of attention has been paid so far in the war to the Ukrainian will to resist, but we should also be gauging the potential Russian will to persist. Accepting that Russia views its vital security interests as bound up in Ukraine to the point that those security concerns are even existential for Russia, then it would seem to suggest Russia will not end their invasion readily. When we also consider that Russia has been trying to destabilize the Ukrainian government for at least 10 years at this point through support to rebel groups in the eastern regions of Ukraine and even with the direct, unconventional intervention of its own soldiers in 2014, then we see even more clearly the depth of Russia’s investment. Russia will not give up in this conflict quickly.

(Host)

Neal Jesse’s Learning from Russia’s Recent Wars: Why, Where, and When Russia Might Strike Next was your next choice. What does it add to the conversation?

(Shatzer)

Neal Jesse’s book brings in an additional layer of analysis on past Russian modern interventions and aggressions since the end of the Soviet Union. Particularly, he focuses in on the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute in Azerbaijan; the civil war in Tajikistan; the Transdniestria conflict in Moldova; the Abkhazia and South Ossetia conflicts in Georgia; the wars in Chechnya; but, especially, the 2014 intervention in Ukraine (the Ukraine crisis). Jesse’s commentary on Russia’s actions in Ukraine in 2014, which he wrote in 2020, I think, are particularly insightful.

Despite corruption issues and other problems in Ukrainian government, Jesse contends that Ukraine actually did a fair job at dealing with the resistance groups and Russian infiltrations. He argues that it managed to stabilize the security situation and largely forwarded Russia’s primary aims. His analysis makes one wonder what lessons Russia might have failed to learn in 2014 about Ukrainian resilience, actually.

Additionally, from his assessment of past Russian interventions, Jesse lays out a pattern of operations that Russia might use in a future conflict with Ukraine, and those assessments actually seem to hit the mark exactly with what we see going on there today: subversive activity to destabilize the situation, deployment of regular military forces, information campaigns, eventual violation of borders, seizing terrain, and the threat of nukes as strategic blackmail. As Jesse correctly concludes, quote, “The Russian threat to Ukraine is the most obvious and the most constant.”

(Host)

There’s no shortage of books on this topic. In fact, you very kindly suggest some at the end of your article. Why did you choose these two to focus on?

(Shatzer)

What I try to do with the article series is review one work that has a more, you know, theoretical, policy, or strategic focus and pair it with a review of a second book that is still strategic but offers a deeper look at theater, strategic, or even operational questions.

I did that in the first article, with reviews on two excellent books examining the security challenge China poses to the US. So Jonsson’s Blurring the Lines and Jesse’s Learning from Russia’s Recent Wars are a very good companion set of books. They’re both concise, at about 200 or fewer pages each. Both still managed to pack in an impressive amount of detail and some thoughtful analysis that I find very relevant to understanding what’s happening in Ukraine today. And together, the two books do a great job of encompassing theory, policy, strategy, and operations in a way that I think leaders and strategists will find useful. There are plenty of other books worth considering on this topic, and I do list a few of those at the end of the article, but I recommend these two as fine places to start if someone is looking for short, insightful works.

(Host)

I wish we had more time. I need to wrap it up, though. What are your final thoughts before we go?

(Shatzer)

So there’s been a fair amount of attention in the...

This podcast examines critical issues for the field of strategic studies raised by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including the waning of major war, strategic coercion, and “War Amongst the People.” Drawing on previous scholarship and current events, this commentary considers the questions raised by the first major war of the twenty-first century. It provides recommendations for scholars and senior leaders on how to work together to address the questions of strategy and policy that have and continue to arise as the war progresses.

Keywords: Russia, Ukraine, strategic coercion, gray zone, compellence

Author information:

Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria II had a distinguished career in the US Army and is currently the editor-in-chief of the US Army War College Press, which includes Parameters. He is a graduate of the United States Military Academy, the US Army Command and General Staff College, and the US Army War College. He holds a doctorate in modern history from Princeton University and is the author of six books, including War’s Logic: Strategic Thought and the American Way of War (2021), Military Strategy: A Very Short Introduction (2017), Reconsidering the American Way of War (2014), Clausewitz and Contemporary War (2007), Imagining Future War (2007), and After Clausewitz (2001), and more than 100 articles and monographs on strategic thinking, military theory, and military history.