In my latest at the Diplomat, I suggest that AirLand Battle is a poor analogy for what the Navy and Air Force are trying to do with AirSea Battle: Rhetorically, AirSea Battle is the child of AirLand Battle, which succeeded Active Defense as United States Army doctrine in 1982. AirLand Battle doctrine explicitly prepared the […]
Tag: military doctrine
I have some thoughts on the diffusion of anti-access military technology over at The Diplomat During the Cold War, the Soviet Union had a strong political incentive to maximize diffusion of its milita
I’ve been frustrated by the discussion over counter-insurgency for quite some time. This week, I took those frustrations out on my WPR column: Of course, abandoning COIN doctrine would not in
This week’s WPR column thinks about the pursuit of “strategic paralysis” in context of James Scott’s discussion of High Modernism in Seeing Like a State: As a doctrine, network centric warfare, like other attempts to create strategic paralysis before it, springs from the same idea as High Modernist projects like Soviet collectivist agriculture: that a […]
My WPR column this week tackles the Great Carrier Debate of ’11, and tries to reframe some of the basic questions: A third method of interpreting weapons acquisition — and naval aviation &
Via Ricks, a brief addendum from General William DePuy to Charli’s post below on small unit dynamics: Why is that? It is because unlike a bomber crew, they don’t have a bomber, unlike a ta
A variety of people have contributed thoughts on progressive security policy. Without getting too much into the weeds on each one, they all provide a certain amount of grist, from Yglesias’ proposal for a new service to Finel’s consideration of terms to Anderson’s detailed look at force requirements. A taste: Yglesias: The beginning of the […]
On Friday evening, InksptsGulliver and I got into a long argument about the appropriate role of ideology in defense policymaking, and consequently of the meaning of “progressive” and “conservati
Bernard Finel suggests that my rant last week about progressive thought on defense slighted existing progressive defense analysts. I partially agree, but only partially. The essay that I wrote was
First off, let me recommend some reading on a couple of defense issues. Galrahn has an excellent post (really, the latest of a long, long series of excellent posts) on the dual Littoral Combat Ship buy. See also UltimaRatioReg who, with typically purple prose, raises legitimate questions about the point of the LCS. Then, see […]
This week’s Over the Horizon column is about inter-service rivalry: Because different services perform different missions, not all contribute equally to certain grand strategic tasks: The Royal
My latest column at World Politics Review has nothing whatsoever to do with the midterm elections: The idea that wars should be fought at a distance has informed British military policy for centuries.