Wavell Room Audio Reads

Pride and Fall tells the story of the British Army and Royal Marines (and more broadly Defence) campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan 2001-2014. It mixes high-level discussions with strategy with tactical vignettes. It offers a highly readable, highly credible history of the period.

This book is bloody brilliant. We highly recommend it.

From people who served in Afghanistan to warfare experts to those with a casual interest, Pride and Fall will help anyone understand. Miller's clarity coupled with a deep understanding of what happened during the campaign make this highly readable. He does it with an engaging style and sense of wit that few can match.

Blow by blow account?

In many ways Pride and Fall is a blow by blow account of the land campaign in Afghanistan. Its chapters are chronological, dealing with the campaign as it happened. It offers tactical details with a clear narrative of events. But you would be mistaken if you thought this was a narrative history. Miller brings out the personalities of the commanders and their preparations to show how they impacted the conduct of the war. For example, 'mowing the lawn' of early campaigns and 'clear hold build'.

It also charts how the campaign developed - or didn't - and questions why.

This analysis alone makes it a useful reference for future study. Miller identifies and explores named individuals to the level of critical analysis that he does, which is something few others have done as effectively. A veteran British reader will recognise many (now senior generals) in their formative years.

The title of the book gives away the general argument about the conduct of the war. Miller's text charts the good and the bad of British strategy. Pride and Fall considers that the war lacked a strategy. But he is not entirely dismissive of Britain's efforts. The rise and increasing effectiveness of intelligence is a key success. The conduct of Op HERRICK 13 is a high point of success, one let down by a lack of resources to exploit it before the drawdown.

Just because some things were bad, not all of it was. His ability to assess the relative merits and offer a nuanced view of the campaign sets it apart from more traditional 'good or bad' narrative history.

Reading it from a doctrine perspective, Pride and Fall adds historical context from which to judge the effectiveness of Britain's new counter-insurgency doctrine. We might conclude, crudely, that Britain had 'all the ideas none of the gear'. But Miller wouldn't quite put it like that. Miller's wider points about how to be better should be grasped by a modern Army facing similar challenges in the future.

Strategy and tactics

Another theme is the interaction between strategy and tactics. The pressure on resources balanced against the reliance on the US is key throughout. London, Miller shows, struggled to stay relevant despite the commitment of British blood and treasure. Multiple Defence Secretaries, changing generals, the home front. How these big hand themes played out on the ground, and notably the C2 challenges it created, offers new angles to consider.

But Pride and Fall doesn't only deal with the science of war. There are long sections detailing the ground reality. These moments offer a glimpse into the human struggles. For example, the role of Company Sergeant Major 'Billy' Roy who straps antlers to his quad bike to deliver Christmas dinners, or the more human details about living outside the wire (or more crudely, taking a **** whilst freezing on a mountain).

Not to mention more relevant examples of long insertion tabs, coalition tensions, human relationships that actually win campaigns. Pride and Fall combined these tactical and human moments with a sense of how they contributed to the wider mission. It brilliantly demonstrates the British soldier (and Marines) sense of humour.

Who is the author?

Sergio Miller is a former Intelligence Corps officer and a regular Wavell Room contributor. His analysis of the war in Ukraine ...

BLUF: This paper proposes the creation of the structures and conditions required to train, lead and deploy a cost-effective Citizen Tri-service Reserve Force at scale during periods of stretch, tension, crisis or war. The Citizen Tri-Service Reserve Force would be available for use.

(1) as a third echelon front line fighting force,

(2) providing rear area and lines of communication security and

(3) in homeland defence, protecting critical national infrastructure.This will be achieved by establishing cadres of experienced ex Regulars and Volunteer Reservists capable of initially training and subsequently leading the Citizen Tri-Service Reserve Force.

Against a changing threat the UK is likely to require more people in uniform than we have now. The Citizen Tri-Service Reserve Force concept utilises those who have already served, putting them in place to prepare thoroughly as training and leadership cadres while saving in the short to medium term the cost of recruiting, remunerating and equipping the bulk of the rank and file (90% of the workforce).

It then sets the conditions to expand when required by having experienced leadership in place to build around.

Strategic background

The threats facing NATO in general and the UK in particular have escalated dramatically following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Furthermore, Eastern Europe is only one of several areas of the world where tensions have risen substantially over recent months and years; any of the others of which (eg Taiwan, Middle East) could erupt so as to distract key allies at a critical moment, potentially reducing their ability to support their NATO commitments in Europe.

Additionally, depending on the attitude of individual NATO members, including a possible future US President, Article 5 of the NATO Treaty may not be quite as binding as is widely assumed.

All of this needs to be set against a context in which the UK has the smallest standing army since Waterloo. Our navy and air force are similarly diminutive. Our Defence remains configured primarily for discretionary campaigning (such as Iraq and Afghanistan) and has not yet fully switched to prepare for non-discretionary conflict against a peer adversary.

The current SDR provides an opportunity to address this necessary change in orientation, which is likely to require the provision of mass in uniform.

Why we need the ability to generate mass

As demonstrated clearly in Ukraine, in a war of any duration, units become worn out and need replacing in the line to rest and recuperate. The UK has no provision for this.

Secondly, if the UK is operating in Eastern Europe in support of its NATO allies, it will have extremely long lines of communication along which its ammunition, equipment, workforce and rations will need to travel. Protecting such lines of communication needs "teeth" units, including infantry, light armour and air defence, especially against drones.

Thirdly, substantial additional resources are needed to support the defence of the UK's critical national infrastructure.

The outgoing Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Patrick Sanders, publicly raised the importance of the UK's ability to create military mass if required in a time of crisis in January 2024.

He was referring to a citizen army (the "third echelon") which history shows is needed to win our wars; under this concept, as in both World Wars, a small core of Regulars (the "first echelon") fight to buy time; the Volunteer Reserves (the "second echelon") then reinforce and help to hold the line; and the citizen army (the "third echelon") concludes the conflict.

Access to large numbers of cost-effective teams and a trained workforce from all three services would be essential in such circumstances. Warfighting assumptions always expect a war to be over within weeks rather than months or years (the size of our armed forces is indeed currently based on this assumption); history, and current events in Ukraine, shows this to be over-o...

Tradition can be defined as an inherited, established and customary pattern of thought or action that can be transmitted from generation to generation due to their commonly accepted authority. In a military sense, Army traditions encompass customs and beliefs that unite different sets of soldiers. These traditions take form to us as behaviours, doctrine and actions.

The British Army's website states that 'The British Army is a professional and disciplined team, with a long tradition of service to the country'.1Readers can infer that this means the Army does the nation's bidding, whether at war or peacetime, without delay or question. This endures (and has done since 1689) always; we know this from the long standing function of Parliament to authorise taxes for war and defence.

It can be safely assumed then that the 'tradition' of the British Army being ever-present and ready to provide defence for the British people is a good one.

Does tradition hold us back?

But do Army traditions hold us back in other areas of defence? As the Army evolves and responds to current and emerging threats can it respond sufficiently? Valerii Zaluzhnyi wrote recently that technology 'boasts an undoubted superiority over tradition'.2

Arguably he was cornered into this analysis through the rigours of a war he oversaw as the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Army, until February 24. However, Zaluzhnyi's dismissal does not make it a poor analysis; Zaluzhnyi's Army went to war with Russia and faced some of the most extreme fighting in Europe since WW2. They have had to adapt and survive whilst holding off Russian military superiority and they learned quickly that holding on to tradition and current thinking was costly.

Adapting to the threat and remaining fluid is one thing; changing your approach entirely is quite another, but quite necessary according to Zaluzhnyi.

When Zaluzhnyi mentioned 'traditions' (doctrine & processes), he was talking about improving the situation on the battlefield. He went so far as to state that a wholesale redesign of battlefield operations was needed to distance themselves from outdated, stereotypical thought processes that were harming his troops and country's war effort through simply being not up to task.

This redesign, he concluded, would reshape Ukrainian military doctrine on a fundamental level for the better and help Ukrainian soldiers compete with and defeat Russian troops. This would however require substantial buy-in to be successfully integrated. No small task but surely too risky to ignore; the war with Russia was handing out lessons in evolutionary warfare and Zaluzhnyi was paying attention.

Relevance of experience

The British Army has had no such recent exposure or conflict with a peer adversary. The COIN environment in Iraq and Afghanistan taught us valuable lessons in insurgency warfare, counter-IED, ISTAR and medical support which 'had a profound impact on the Army's equipment, training and doctrine',3 but arguably did not find shortcomings in it. Consequently we have no experience of what should be retained and what should be dismissed or updated regarding our approach to warfare and warfighting.

How are we to know if our doctrine will hold up in a large-scale peer to peer engagement? We have banked heavily on the Land Operating Concept (LOpC): 18 months in the making, full of NATO partner consultation input and interrogated by RUSI, ISS and DTsL; it is the doctrine that dictates how we will win future wars. General Sir Patrick Sanders said it is 'the most robustly evidenced and inclusive piece of conceptual thinking that the Army has produced in over three decades.

This places the British Army at the intellectual edge of land warfare, able to lead in NATO and support our sister services across all domains'. 4

The LOpC clearly shows then that as an organisation we are attuned to the need to evolve and adapt to the changing threats around the globe. It highlights the need for need for technological sup...

"The Reservist is twice the citizen" - Winston Churchill

Genesis

The Royal Navy (RN) has the Maritime Reserve (MR), a 1* led Fighting Arm1 (FA), however, it could be argued that it is not taken seriously as a capability and is therefore not value for money. If the RN were to take the Maritime Reserve seriously, the MR would require a directed operational output, a 'head mark', a thought-out function, in conjunction with regular cadre of personnel who are taught the necessary knowledge and experience on how to employ it to enhance naval power.

This article offers options for the output the MR should have in supporting the RN operationally. Its time to move on from the 'fantasy fleets'. Instead, lets discuss NATO-level, UK Defence-wide, and RN-specific strategy statements to derive function and in turn, elicit discussions of form. It will not - unlike a recent RUSI2 paper - look to use the Royal Naval3 Reserve (RNR) in addressing potential capability gaps in UK Defence.

Though, its potential scope is MR wide, its focus is the RNR, as the largest MR element and the one facing the hardest questions about its future operational utility. Additionally, this paper is written in the spirit of the Chief of the Defence Staff's recent direction4 on embracing debate from juniors in challenging the status quo.

"A good Navy is not a provocation to war; it is the surest guaranty of Peace" - Theodore Roosevelt

Function

The RNR/Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) were formed in 1859 and 1903 respectively, to supply sailors in times of war for the RN; the MR now is approximately 3500 people spread across the RNR & Royal Marines Reserve (RMR) and is the only standalone reserve organisation in UK Defence.

The war in Ukraine and recent events in Israel5show that Reserves are still vital for delivering national security; internationally their use also mimics how our own Naval Reserves were used during both world wars. In WW2, 68%6 of Naval personnel were Reservists of various kinds7, who jokingly referred to their regular counterparts as the "caretakers"8.

Such past precedents beg contemporary questions: could today's RN triple its personnel numbers swiftly in a time of major conflict, and would it need to? Today, the Maritime Reserve is a mere 10%9 of total RN personnel - but if the RN embraced use of reservists as Australia does (30%), could this alleviate personnel gaps too, while being better value for money?

The UK is not currently under an immediate existential threat (barring a catastrophic escalation of the war in Ukraine or entanglement in a US-China conflict). However, the function of the RNR and wider reserves should be designed around a framework that recognises the possibility of direct interstate conflict - not just the precursory stages such as competition and crisis to ensure our continued national security, as articulated in the most recent Defence Command Paper (the 2023 'Refresh').

The utility of the RNR to the RN is primarily to supply Surge in war while being affordable and Niche in peacetime. Yet the recent cancelling of training on financial grounds (the infamous "In-Year Measures"), effects from COVID, and Maritime Reserve "Transformation" (a euphemistic label for various top-down reorganisations) has lowered morale, seeing an exodus10 from the trained strength.

In NATO, there are four11 recognised types of reservists.

Niche(specialist) capabilities that do not exist, at all or in sufficient strength, in the regular forces.

Complementary. This is a capability - at the lower end of the operational spectrum - for which the full suite of military competencies is not needed, freeing regular forces.

Supplementary. This is a capability at the higher end of operations to rotate or reinforce the regular forces.

Surge. This is an expansion base for mobilisation in a large-scale defence emergency, the traditional Reserve role.

In the Future Reserves 3012 paper, the role of reservists is articulated as.

The Reinforcement Reserve - r...

Introduction

Since the Gaza war began nearly a year ago, Israel has conducted dozens of airstrikes against Iranian-linked targets across the Middle East. There is a widespread concern that the ongoing low-level conflict may escalate into an all-out war between the two nations. Nevertheless, Tehran, for its part, does not seem inclined to escalate into a full-scale war. There are six pivotal reasons for Iran's strategic impasse.

Fear of a Regime Change

The first reason relates to Tehran's prioritisation of regime preservation. Iran knows that the Islamic regime itself may become the primary target for removal in a conflict. Iran's economy is strained due to long-standing sanctions and domestic economic challenges. A direct conflict with Israel would worsen Iran's economic troubles.

Moreover, ethnic minority groups within Iran, such as the Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, and Baluchis, have long been exasperated with the Iranian regime and there is a genuine risk that Israel may engage with these groups.

Potential US Involvement

A second factor is that a war between Iran and Israel would likely draw the United States, Israel's historic ally, into the war. The power asymmetry between the US and Iran is striking. The US stands unmatched in its capabilities. Conversely, Tehran's efforts to modernise its conventional forces have yielded limited success due to the country's defence economics problems.

Regional Interests

Tehran's direct war with Israel would certainly jeopardise its regional interests. Iran strongly emphasises advancing its sectarian geopolitical ambitions within regions traditionally considered part of the Iranian/Shia sphere of influence. A direct conflict with Israel could potentially provide opportunities for Saudi Arabia, a key antagonist seeking to counter Iran's growing influence in the Middle East, and its allies to exploit the situation to their advantage.

Strategic Culture

The Iranian army has not faced a large-scale war since the Iran-Iraq war. The bitter experience of the war with Iraq led Iran to move away from conventional warfare tactics. Iran has opted for asymmetric strategies instead of engaging in a direct war with its adversaries. Iran supports Hezbollah, Houthis, and Hamas due to their shared objective of opposing Israel. This allows Tehran to pursue its objectives while minimising the risk of direct and large-scale retaliation from Israel.

The relative success of these methods has reinforced Tehran's commitment to an indirect approach.

Nuclear Program

The fifth reason influencing Tehran's unwillingness to confront Israel is its progressive advancement in its own nuclear program. Iran has been enriching uranium to higher levels, developing more sophisticated centrifuges, and enhancing the range and payload capacities of its ballistic missiles. Initiating a full-fledged war against Israel would risk undermining this progress, given that it could provoke strikes on Iranian nuclear personnel and facilities.

Winning Strategic Battle of Perception

The last point worth mentioning is Tehran's belief that engaging in a direct confrontation with Israel would eventually benefit Israel at a time when global opinion is turning against it due to the significant civilian casualties and suffering in Gaza. In contemporary wars, military victory is no longer solely defined by battlefield success, as in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah conflict. It is possible that Israel could face a similar destiny in Gaza.

Therefore, Iran is very likely leveraging Israel's aggressive response against Hamas to undermine Israel's and, by extension, the United State's credibility.

What Might Come Next?

Iran is confronted with a challenging situation: it must find a way to respond that upholds its reputation while mitigating the risk of escalating to full-scale war with Israel, a scenario in which Tehran stands to lose more than it stands to gain. Choosing inaction or a feeble response could erode the domestic unity of the Iranian regime. Iran's d...

Introduction

On 23 August, the Houthis, a Yemen-based rebel group, attacked a Greek-flagged vessel in the Red Sea, causing an oil leak and threatening an environmental catastrophe in one of the world's most frequently used waterways. On 2 September, the group attacked a Saudi and a Panama-flagged oil tanker in the same sea area- using a combination of missiles and one-way attack drones.

These attacks are part of a broader campaign carried out by the Houthi rebels since Israel's war on Gaza that involve hybrid maritime warfare.

Since October 2023, the Yemen-based group has attacked more than 100 commercial and military ships in the Red Sea. The Houthi movement claimed that they viewed any vessel connected to Israel or heading to or from there as legitimate targets. However, in practice, they have conducted indiscriminate attacks on ships from various nations.

Hybrid Maritime Warfare

The Houthis' actions perfectly align with what leading US defence intellectual Frank G. Hoffman once called hybrid maritime warfare. Hoffman has defined hybrid maritime warfare as 'a form of warfare combining asymmetric naval tactics, sophisticated weapons, and terrorist activity'. He argued that Iran and Iraq's systematic attacks against merchant vessels in the late 1980s, which became known as the Tanker War, exemplified maritime hybrid warfare.

A non-state armed group, the Houthis, has now adopted this method of warfare. The Houthis possess advanced military capabilities, including anti-ship cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, aerial drones, and uncrewed naval drones. The group has primarily targeted commercial vessels in their attacks, with these actions against Red Sea shipping clearly constituting maritime terrorism. They have also attacked military ships.

In early March, the rebels used naval missiles and drones against several American and allied warships in the Red Sea. Such attacks can be classified as guerrilla warfare at sea.

The group's combination of advanced conventional capabilities with asymmetric naval warfare tactics - characterised by surprise attacks on enemy ships and efforts to avoid military response - represents a hybrid maritime threat. But who are the Houthis, and what drives them to pursue such a campaign?

Who are the Houthis?

The Houthi movement, also referred to as Ansar Allah (supporters of God), is a Yemen-based armed political and religious organisation associated with and acts on behalf of the country's Shia Muslim minority, the Zaidis. The Houthi rebels captured Yemen's largest and capital city, Sana'a, in 2014 and have since waged a fierce and protracted civil conflict against the Yemeni government, which is itself supported by the Saudi-Arabia-led Sunni alliance.

The Houthis currently wield substantial political power in Zaidi-majority areas of Yemen.

Why are the Houthis attacking ships at the Red Sea?

The Houthis, alongside various non-state actors, including Hezbollah, Hamas, and Kata'ib Hezbollah, identify themselves as part of the Iranian-led 'axis of resistance' against Israel and the United States. Since Israel's war on Gaza, the rebel group has fired more than 200 drones and cruise missiles at Israeli territory to show its solidarity with Hamas.

Houthi leaders have repeatedly warned of escalating and more sophisticated military assaults against Israel, calling for an end to Israel's brutal war on Gaza. As previously noted, the Houthi rebels have also carried out attacks against dozens of merchant and naval vessels in the Red Sea, regardless of their connection to Israel or its allies.

These actions aim to disrupt international shipping and create anxiety among countries that support or at least do not contradict Israel's actions in the Gaza Strip.

The Houthis and Iran

The main factor giving the Houthis access to advanced weapons is their close ties with Iran. The Houthi movement engages in sectarian geopolitical projects in alignment with Tehran's pursuit of regional hegemony. In return, Iran has large...

Terminology versus motivation

Reluctance, risk aversion, and the wrong centre of gravity

Useful scenarios

The Army does not have the luxury of being able to ignore criminal actors

Feature image credit: MOD

"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting"

~ Sun Tzu

Why didn't Russia deploy amphibious forces to the shores of Odesa in the spring of 2022? At that point, Russians confronted the failure of the drive to Kyiv and challenges along a long front. A potential landing might have turned a flank or presented hard choices to Ukrainian leaders. Unarmed with first-hand evidence of Russian decision-making but well-served by hindsight, the authors assess that the amphibious flanking attack didn't happen because it was infeasible.

Ukrainian maritime defenses were unexpectedly effective. Sustaining forces ashore would be precarious. Isolated Russian troops ashore would be more liability than asset, and so the expected payoff from any landing was low. Russian commanders faced an acute area denial challenge.

Amphibious warfare strategy, it seems, is in need of some exploration because, after a deterrence failure in February 2022, Ukraine used tools of sea denial to deter the Black Sea Fleet from an amphibious landing in March.

This snapshot raises a question and points to an answer. What can you do with amphibious forces given current area denial, especially sea denial, measures; particularly in Europe? Those tools of sea denial mean that fouling the waters is easy but clearing them is hard. Because of this, sea denial is easier today and sea control is growing more challenging. Threats to large landing ships make traditional amphibious assaults - called forcible entry operations in the American vernacular - riskier.

Simply using amphibious forces to do ground operations in a new patch of land is too hazardous. On the other hand, a divergent model has promise to contribute to sea control.

Concepts designed for the Indo-Pacific have value in Europe

Specifically, deploying multiple, distributed, mobile cohorts of NATO marines ashore will support a broader effort. To gain and maintain sea control will be long, resource intensive, and entail a complex mix of complementary measures. In Europe, NATO can marshal potent amphibious tools, but will need new employment models to use them effectively. The traditional model expects a methodical sequence of actions to set conditions for landing.

A new "outside-in" model uses small landing forces preemptively to establish sea and archipelagic denial. This is most valuable for deterrence, but counts also as insurance in case that deterrence fails.

Four factors have the most impact on how allied amphibious forces can operate in today's operational environment:

1. First is the spread and variety of threats to maritime transit. Ukraine's successful strikes on Russia's Black Sea Fleet and the Houthis' parried attempts to disrupt Red Sea commerce illustrate the same point. The latent potential to strike ships at sea is widespread. Beneath the surface and out of view, sea mines, torpedoes, and other nefarious but subtle instruments of destruction or disruption abound.

2. Second, an accident of geography places many key geopolitical flashpoints of today along narrow waterways. Any list of potential triggers for major armed conflict between defenders of the current order and its challengers includes territory adjacent to narrow or enclosed waterways such as the Mediterranean, Black, or Baltic Seas.

Regardless of where an adversary might strike, be it in Lithuania, Taiwan, or the contested territories of the South China Sea, maintaining sea control will be critical to defense. Consider that Finland relies on maritime transit for 90% of its imports and exports.

3. Third, NATO's two newest members, Finland and Sweden, have mature and hardened capabilities to frustrate aggressive maritime harassment and targeting. Integrating such skills is a key advantage of their accession.

4. Fourth, sophisticated defenses against aircraft and missiles are possible but costly. What we've seen in the past year in the skies over Kyiv, Tel Aviv, and the Red Sea is that air and missile defense is feasible but no...

Israel's New Wars is the latest book by Dr. Ehud Eilam. For nearly three decades, Eilam has studied Israel's national security and written widely, including for the Wavell Room, about how the state should protect itself.

In Israel's New Wars, Eilam explores how recent conflict with Iran and its partners has differed from Israel's fighting between 1948 and 1982. It contrasts fighting conventionally and fighting non-state actors, bringing historical perspective andmes. As a book, it is focused more on the tactical aspect of military power but verges on identifying the operational thinking.

Several of Eilam's arguments standout.

How to prepare?

Common with contemporary Western military thinking, Israel's New Wars finds a tension between exactly what type of war to prepare for. The day-to-day operations on the border or major conventional operations? This is a tension that the Israeli Defence Force has been struggling with as they veer from conflict to conflict. This is a trend that is apparent when contrasting the periods of history he uses.

This tension also carries over into equipment. Looking, for example, Israel's armour, he finds a very good system of upgrades for main battle tanks. However, upgrading to defeat one threat means they are less well prepared against others. This seem more consistent with Israeli naval power or air upgrades. There are similar trends in training and how to prepare soldiers for mobilisation effectively.

Whilst Eilam doesn't say it directly, he strongly implies that Israel's inability to prepare for either properly impacted its performance, ultimately leading to multiple draws in recent fighting. Earlier fighting ended in more decisive victory.

Ground holding or precision strike?

The book also explores the tensions of the different military strategies required. For example, conventional wars require large ground-holding operations and/or air strikes. Fighting non-state actions, however, does not. While air power is important to both, he presents an interesting discussion about the continuing utility of tubed artillery and its importance to effective military operations in both forms of operation.

Another theme explored is deterrence. Eilam finds that Israel has a mixed record of deterrence. Israel has been more effective with conventional deterrence, with some success against non-state actors. However, the disparate nature of such actors often means that miscalculation leads to war or splinter groups provoke unneeded responses.

Operational - Strategic

This is perhaps an area where Eilam would benefit from more analysis. The book is generally tactical in its nature. It struggles to view the problems from the perspective of Israel's opponents when discussing why deterrence hasn't been effective. This theme is common in much security writing, and the baseline assumption seems to be that deterrence rests on destroying lots of the enemy. If, as he identifies, it doesn't work well, what does?

Another limitation stems from this: the link between the tactical and operational. Eilam does draw some operational considerations, even some strategic ones. However, they feel underdeveloped. This is unfair; Israel's New Wars did not set out to be a full analysis. Such a task would be near impossible. But focusing on destroying things or holding ground would benefit from a little more strategic thinking.

We suggest that there are deeper considerations for Israeli military thinkers out there when contrasting the wars that he seeks to do. In some ways, Eilam's line of thought is a mirror of Mary Kaldor's infamous 'new wars' theory of the 1990s. Perhaps our thinking should now be beyond that now and we wonder if Israel's New Wars was a missed opportunity to consider how balance the competiting demands of conflict.

From a NATO perspective, Eilam is right to identify the tension and differences in the type of war faced then and now and how they are consistent. A decade after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the military...

If the war against Ukraine has highlighted any truth, it is that the defense industrial bases of the United States and Europe are woefully underequipped for the demands of high-intensity conventional warfare. The United States was and remains the only country that retained the kinds of stockpiles necessary to support Ukraine's defense and future offense, and it faces competing demands for those declining inventories.

Yet, for a country with a nearly $900 billion budget, it seems unable to get what it needs, when it needs it, and at a scale necessary for what it anticipates as future conflicts, not the least of which is with China over Taiwan.

The issue is, fundamentally, one of acquisition and procurement. The speed and urgency that drives the bureaucracy of the Department of Defense has not kept pace with the speed of innovation that drives Silicon Valley. In the age of the iPhone the Pentagon is using the Blackberry, at best (and not a late generation one, at that). There are shoots of growth through the concrete of the military's purchasing systems.

Groups like the Defense Innovation Unit (; formerly known as the Defense Innovation Unit - Experimental or DIUx) have sought to bridge the gap between Washington and Silicon Valley. Authors Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff, the former director of DIU and a driver of its creation, respectively, recount the creation of the Unit, its struggles, and its successes in the aptly titled book "".

It would seem to be a tall order, make Pentagon acquisition a thrilling read, but Shah and Kirchhoff manage to pull it off and rather well.

Filled with anecdotes of how the supposedly technologically cutting-edge services of the American armed forces operated in a surprisingly analogue manner, the authors tell the story of how DIU and others sought to match the warfighters' needs with Silicon Valley's innovations."Unit X" rightly focuses on the challenges of rapid innovation and rapid ingestion of new technologies. This is something for which the Pentagon, as the authors demonstrate, is not designed.

"Unit X" is not a story of nifty new technologies alone. It is really about the challenge of how the United States stays ahead of China, the pacing threat in strategic competition. Here, the Chinese Communist Party enjoys considerable competitive systemic advantages. A vertically integrated authoritarian-capitalist system, Beijing can better direct resources - human or capital - with rapid efficiency and arguably fewer bureaucratic hurdles.

China's aggressive corporate and military espionage campaigns have allowed it to leapfrog generations of innovation and trial and error. More alarmingly, the gap between theft and indigenous innovation is rapidly closing, with China able to develop more novel, domestic technologies at a greater rate than once anticipated.

The authors close "Unit X" by focusing on Ukraine (as is de rigueur today), which for many is seen as the standard-bearer for technological innovation, testing, and deployment. Senior military leaders on both sides of the Atlantic look to Ukraine wistfully, as a model of how they wish they could innovate and ingest new technologies - they want the war-time acquisition system without the war. That last part is key - in the absence of a clear driver of change, change is not forthcoming.

The problem is Ukraine is not the model they often think it is - that rapid adoption of new technologies is by consequence, not design. Those impressive and haunting first-person-video drones are used at such rates due to insufficient quantities of conventional artillery (which the United States and Europe are still failing to deliver). Those drone videos are also only the successful strikes.

The ratio of failure to success decidedly favors the former over the latter, especially as Russian electronic warfare improves. Ukraine's naval successes are deeply impressive, but miss key that when included make the lessons of the Black Sea unapplicable to other thea...