I have been looking forward to Dima Adamsky’s The Culture of Military Innovation: The Impact of Cultural Factors on the Revolution in Military Affairs in Russia, the United States, and Israel (very wordy title) for a while, so I was very excited when Stanford University Press sent me a review copy (I suppose I should note as a full disclosure that I regularly receive review copies from them as well as other publishers, free of charge). I have followed Adamsky’s work on the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) and operational theory generally and have been eagerly awaiting his summary of how the RMA (or, the Military-Technical Revolution in Russia) concept diffused through three military cultures. [click to continue ...]
From the monthly archives:
February 2010
Joseph Fouche has an interesting post that I missed on General Philip Sheridan of Civil War fame visiting the front lines of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. Sheridan went off to see the latest in conventional operations. This is part of a longstanding tradition in American strategy of sending observers or volunteers into foreign conflicts to observe trends. As Clausewitz and Ferdinand Foch both wrote in their respective works on strategy, a lack of experience in conflict forces the defense policy maker and soldier to use history and battlefield trends elsewhere as a guide for formulating strategy. [click to continue ...]
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What’s new and what’s old? Debate over defense theory and practice has focused much in recent years about the novelty of respective defense theories and terminology. This debate, like the COIN debate, is probably going to continue to go around in circles. Is war more complex than it has been in the past? Probably not. So why do we feel like it is? [click to continue ...]
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In the recently published Report of the Defense Science Board 2008 Summer Study on Capability Surprise, the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board (DSB) notes the following among its recommendations:
Red teaming as the norm instead of the exception. Secretary of Defense direct the use of red teaming throughout DOD by developing and employing best practice guides, intellectual focus in professional military education, and more aggressive use of red teams in exercises. The Secretary should also lead by example and establish a strategic-level red team to challenge and inform national security and top level defense policies and strategies.1
We, of course, agree with this recommendation and have offered similar recommendations in the past, including this 2008 call for a red teaming “surge.”
Notes:
- This text is drawn from the co-chairs’ submission letter at the start of the report. [↩]
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