Experts, including Congressional Strategic Posture Commission Commissioners, examine the future of US nuclear strategy to develop nonpartisan policies addressing key security challenges facing the nation.
MAPPING PREMODERN SMALL WAR: THE CASE OF THE THIRTY YEARS WAR (1618-48)
★★★ ABSTRACT: The example of the Thirty Years War (1618–48) demonstrates that small war was already integral to the conduct of premodern hostilities. Commanders employed these methods with a purpose and generally tried to limit the accompanying violence to preserve discipline and effectiveness, as well as their claims to be waging a just war. We... Continua a leggere →
Globalizing the Thirty Years War: Early German Newspapers and their Geopolitical Perspective on the Atlantic World
★★★ ABSTRACT: At the height of the Thirty Years War, news from South America, West Africa and the Caribbean was widespread and quickly distributed in the central European peripheries of the early modern Atlantic world. Despite the German retreat from sixteenth-century colonial experiments, overseas reports sometimes appeared in remote southern German towns before they were... Continua a leggere →
The Long Pivot The Development of the Joint Warfighting Concept
★★ The final withdrawal of troops from Iraq in December 2011 left most U.S. military leadership with the desire to shift their focus from counterinsurgency—which had achieved a position of intellectual dominance in the U.S. military during the war on terror in the late 2000s— back to conventional warfighting. The Service chiefs, who were responsible... Continua a leggere →
Fundamentals of Guerrilla Warfare: Theory and Practice (II)
★★ Guerrilla units operating in cities must solve strictly defined tasks, limited in scale, being, in fact, reconnaissance and sabotage groups. This is due to the fact that, according to their conditions (high population density, dense transport network, active police and counterintelligence activities, etc.), cities, as well as suburban areas, are the most unfavorable terrain... Continua a leggere →
Fundamentals of Guerrilla Warfare: Theory and Practice (I)
★★ DOZENS of more or less large-scale local conflicts that took place during the 20th century, as well as the experience of using guerrilla methods of armed struggle during World War II, allow us to make some generalizations and conclusions. Despite all their enormous diversity in political, military and geographical conditions, it is possible to... Continua a leggere →
The grand strategy of carl von clausewitz
★★ As the affairs of states continue to evolve into a complex web of interdependence, cooperation, and competition, pressure mounts on states to effectively employ the tools of statecraft to attain their political objects. The contention of this essay is that Carl von Clausewitz implicitly defined grand strategy in his magnum opus, On War, as the... Continua a leggere →
German Mission Orders
Their Doctrinal and Operational Development from 1866-1940 and Mission Order Combat Illustrations from the 1870-71, 1914-18 and 1939-45 Wars ★★★ “Orders are not written out in the minutest detail, a mission is merely given the commander. How it shall be carried out is his problem. This is done because the commander on the ground is... Continua a leggere →
Extending the Battlefield [ed. 1981]
★★★ General Donn A. Starry made the following comments on the genesis of this March 1981 article and AirLand Battle: “The ultimate lesson of `Active Defense’ and the 1976 edition of FM [US Army Field Manual] 100-5 [Operations] is that it is virtually impossible to substantively rewrite doctrine satisfactorily in a matter of three years,... Continua a leggere →
D-Day 1944 – Air Power Over the Normandy Beaches and Beyond
★★★ Operation Overlord, the Normandy invasion--like William the Conqueror's before it or the Inchon landing afterwards--will long be studied as a classic in military planning, logistics, and operations. OVERLORD depended to a remarkable degree upon the use of air power in virtually all its forms. A half-century ago, aircraft were primitive vehicles of war compared to... Continua a leggere →
