National Security Education: The View from Newport
Last week saw graduation day at the Naval War College here in Newport, and that makes it a fitting time to reflect on the state of professional military education, or PME. George Mason professor Audrey...
View ArticleSinking the Next-13-Navies Fallacy
The war against naval factoids is a quagmire! A primary theater in this whack-a-mole struggle is the notion that America’s navy is “stronger” than the next X navies, and thus, we should rest easy about...
View ArticleDistributed Lethality: The Navy’s Fix for Anti-Access?
Disperse, disperse, and disperse again. Disperse firepower among surface warships, making every vessel a combatant. Disperse the fleet into compact surface action groups. Disperse surface action groups...
View ArticleBury Your Own “String of Pearls”
From the annals of Slow-Motion Quick Responses… Breaking News! A team from the National Defense University (NDU) is objecting to a Naval Diplomat column of mine from November which commented on a...
View ArticleU.S. Submarines: To Stealth or not to Stealth?
Et tu, Representative Forbes, et tu? Earlier this week, asked whether the U.S. Navy is “over-investing in submarines,” the redoubtable Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee chairman maintained...
View ArticleWhy Jointness Makes for Bad Strategy, and Other Thoughts
The 2015 U.S. National Military Strategy is chock-full of wholesome goodness yet may leave those who do business in great waters feeling undernourished. Why? Because the strategy is so determinedly —...
View ArticleFive Lessons on War From My Desert Shield/Storm
According to navy lore, a sea story starts with “there I was” — and everything that follows is a falsehood. So there I was, 25 years ago today, staring out across the vast Atlantic as a gunnery officer...
View ArticleChina’s A2/AD is a Far Cry from the Maginot Line
Robbie Gramer and Rachel Rizzo wrote a nifty article this week likening China’s anti-access/area-denial strategy (A2/AD) and forces to the Maginot Line, the defensive works that ringed interwar France....
View ArticleFabian Strategies, Then and Now
There’s a hardy perennial question among practitioners and scholars of strategy. Namely, how do weaker warring parties overcome the strong? Sometimes they do. Looking back through history, one...
View ArticleClausewitz Would Not Like America’s Islamic State Strategy
What would Clausewitz say about the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)? As the Prussian sage and his fellow greats of strategic theory might counsel, America is waging an...
View ArticleThe U.S. Navy’s Big New Missile Mod: What Friends and Foes Should Know
Bitter tears are being wept in Beijing, Moscow, and other hives of scum and villainy around the world. Last week, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter delivered heartwarming news for any U.S. Navy surface...
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