Volume 3, Issue 1
Winter 2012
Clausewitz and Connectivity
David Betz
In this article David Betz explores the effect of connectivity on war and warfare. He finds the effect on the latter to be large, but on the former to be small. Clausewitz’s ‘wonderful trinity’, written in a technologically much more static age, remains a valid conceptual frame for understanding the current turmoil of ‘information age’ security.
ReadQuantum Strategy: The Interior World of War
M.L.R. Smith
Strategy is often conceived as a practical process of applying means to ends. Using Clausewitz’s observation that the result in war is never final, this essay seeks to challenge this conventional understanding in order to reveal the essential nature of resistance, which in itself contains lessons and insights for the careful strategist.
ReadA U.S. Military Force-Political Objective Disconnect: Assessments and Assumptions Matter
Robert C. Boyles
Is there a US policy-strategy disconnect? History is not kind to ideal conceptions of war that do not match with complex policy objectives. Lt Col Robert C. Boyles examines prevailing U.S. military assessments and assumptions, and identifies some necessary reassessments and refined assumptions.
ReadStrategy: How to Make it Work
Robert Mihara
In this article, Robert Mihara contends that the quiescence of US military leaders over national security policy is premised on a flawed understanding of the nature of strategy, and he argues that such policy agnosticism reduces strategy for the military institutions to a dangerous exercise in futility.
ReadMust American Strategy Be Grand?
Adam Elkus
American grand strategic thought isn’t very grand or strategic. Classical strategy and American grand strategy may never see eye-to-eye, but Adam Elkus suggest that more attention to classical strategy’s insights can only benefit an increasingly adrift grand strategic discourse.
ReadThe Mythology of Grand Strategy
Lukas Milevski
The common history of grand strategic thought is dominated by only a couple of names, and the interpretation of this history is dominated by assumptions about the trajectory the evolution of the concept has taken based upon misinterpretations of the past. These two factors blend together into a mythology which not only obscures most of the real history and development of grand strategic thought but also supports the current major interpretations of the concept, which are otherwise unquestioned and arguably unjustified. Ultimately, the way to a full and conscientious understanding of grand strategy necessarily lies through a serious study of the concept’s history.
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