Decisive Point Podcast

To compete effectively for global influence, US Army and defense planners should focus on economic globalization in addition to security interests when assessing potential foreign military partners. The results of a quantitative analysis of US-led exercise participants between 1990 and 2016 demonstrate the variety of interests, including economic, that underly a partner’s decision to train or not with US forces. Since the US Army bills itself as the “partner of choice,” this piece will interest military and policy practitioners involved in strategically assessing potential international military partners. Read the article here: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss4/13/ Email usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article. Keywords: economic interests, globalization, strategic competition, multinational exercises, bilateral exercises

The China Landpower Studies Center will open in 2024. It is intended to be an approachable organization. It will tackle the complex and pressing questions about China’s emergence as a global power and its implications for the US military and provide senior leaders and practitioners with a better understanding of the strategies, capabilities, and the integration of the PLA into the CCP’s campaign to turn the rules-based international order to its advantage. Further, the Center will share insights and recommendations for developing better deterrence strategies and campaigns for the United States and our allies Read the article here: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss4/16/ Email usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article. Keywords: China, Taiwan, Philippines, South China Sea, China Landpower Studies Center

Reflexive control aims to change the other’s perceptions about their utility sets. It contains underlying elements that could help give structure to analyses of strategic behavior by using a nonlinear approach that aims to improve the quality of assessments. This podcast explores the interpretations of the concept of reflexive control, how elements of ref lexive control link to the more widely accepted body of knowledge, and how these elements could be valuable additions to the current work on the analysis of strategic behavior. E-mail usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article. Keywords: reflexive control, strategic behavior, strategic analysis, nonlinearity, complex adaptive system

This podcast enters the debate on American grand strategy by questioning the logic underpinning offshore balancing. It concludes that the United States is an ambivalent balancer due to the stopping power of water. It builds on the relevant literature in international relations, producing a novel set of theoretical propositions that are applied to the contemporary Middle East. There and elsewhere, the United States could fail to maintain the balance of power when it is most threatened.

A change in deterrence thought and strategy is necessary to avoid nuclear escalation in armed conflict with Russia. Traditional threat-based deterrence strategies will not be successful, and a new strategy must address the conditions that might cause Russian leadership to employ nuclear weapons. An examination of the Able Archer 83 exercise using an original framework highlights the ways Russian interests and US actions interact to generate misperception and inhibited deterrence. The US military must execute extremely restrained, deliberate, and empathetic operations that pursue minimalist military objectives to achieve the political goal. Read the article here: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss4/10/ Email usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article. Keywords: deterrence, nuclear, misperception, Russia, multidomain operations

The Russia-Ukraine War holds many lessons for the US Army and American policymakers and leaders on the nature and role of reconnaissance-strike complexes in modern combat, especially Ukraine’s development of a battle-management system that uses unmanned aerial systems and satellite reconnaissance to enable the fire coordination for deep strikes into the enemy rear. In the research presented here, open-source analysis and interviews in Ukraine focus on the development and employment of reconnaissance-strike complexes with respect to deep strike and the likelihood of mutual territorial attack. Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss4/9/ Keywords: unmanned aerial systems, deep strike, reconnaissance-strike complex, electronic warfare, Russia-Ukraine War Email usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on the genesis article or the podcast.

In February 2022, many observers initially evaluated the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a failure of Western deterrence.That assessment was and is f lawed inasmuch as the West never articulated a clear strategy to deter such an invasion. Engaging with relevant conceptual debates about how deterrence works and relating this information to what the West did and did not do in the run-up to the invasion, this article shows that deterrence efforts were based on problematic assumptions about the Kremlin’s motivations. The study concludes with lessons for Western military and policy practitioners with the intention to enable better future thinking about how to deter Russia. Keywords: deterrence, Ukraine, Russia, Putin, NATO Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss4/8

Due to a global trend toward urbanization and Russian and Chinese aggression toward Ukraine and Taiwan, respectively, urban resistance to occupation merits greater study. The research here presents a much-needed and unique analysis of Dutch-language primary sources on the Netherlands’ World War II urban resistance to occupation. It provides deeper insights into the occupation experiences of a highly urbanized, densely populated country in which clandestine underground and auxiliary elements played paramount roles in resistance efforts for most of the occupation period. It also illustrates the feasibility of overt, guerrilla-based activity in urban environments during the final phase of a conflict and offers insights into an understudied Landpower activity that modern at-risk countries should develop and hone. Read the article here: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss3/14/ Email usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article. Keywords: resistance to occupation, Resistance Operating Concept, underground, special operations forces, megacity

The Antarctic Treaty of 1961 largely prevented conflicts on the continent, but growing pressure on the treaty system could affect the global community and the United States. This article utilizes historical documents and press reports to examine these challenges, which include ice deterioration, unreported and unregulated fishing, resource extraction preparation, and hostilities between treaty members. Given that these challenges involve China and Russia, it is in the United States’ interest to understand them and the potential request for US military intervention to maintain global security and treaty interests. Read the article here: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss3/12/ Email usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article. Keywords: Antarctica, Antarctic Treaty, sea levels, unreported and unregulated fishing, global power competition

Taiwan has become increasingly important to the United States and its allies as the Russia-Ukraine War has united democracies against authoritarian expansionism and indeed has developed an international democracy-authoritarianism dynamic in global affairs. Part one of this article clearly outlined the geopolitical, economic, and soft-power reasons why Taiwan is strategically important. Part two reviews the development of US and allied policy statements on Taiwan—from the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to the present—and provides policymakers and military strategists with incremental but realistic recommendations for understanding the current dynamic of the region and fashioning responses to deter further authoritarian aggression. Read the article here: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss3/11/ Email usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article. Keywords: Taiwan, China, Russia, Ukraine, National Security Strategy, Biden

The United States must place Russia’s focus on geographic concerns at the center of future strategy development to build a constructive relationship with Russia and achieve US regional goals. This article analyzes Russia’s geography and historical impact on Russian foreign policy, outlines Moscow’s current foreign policy goals, and highlights underlying concerns for US policymakers and military practitioners. By pursuing policies that support Russian goals of economic integration, mitigation of demographic concerns, and security of national borders, the United States can set the foundation for productive engagement on critical issues. Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss3/13/ Keywords: US-Russian relations, geopolitics, military strategy, demographics, diplomacy, geography, economic investment Episode Transcript Email usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article. Keywords: strategic inflection point, Ukraine, multidomain operations (MDO), mission command, large-scale combat operations (LSCO) Stephanie Crider (Host) You’re listening to Decisive Point. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors, and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, The US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. I’m talking today with Major Caitlin Irby, author of “US Russia Foreign Policy: Confronting Russia’s Geographic Anxieties,” (https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss3/13/) which was published in the autumn 2023 issue of Parameters. Irby is an Air Force Intelligence officer currently serving at Fort Liberty, NC. Welcome to Decisive Point, Caitlin. Caitlin P. Irby Good morning, and thanks for having me. Host Your article takes on the topic of the future of US Russia policy. What inspired you to write this piece? Irby Well, I really started studying Russia during my assignment at Special Operations Command, Europe. “I got there in 2015, so it was shortly after the Russian incursion into Crimea and the Donbas. I enjoyed that work so much, I started reading about Russia outside of work and in my free time. And I really started thinking about the fact that the US goal was stated to deter Russia, but we had obviously failed at that a couple of times at this point. And so, I started just sort of thinking about what might actually work in line with all of my reading. And then, unfortunately, we failed again come 2022. So, really, this article is a conclusion of about seven years worth of me thinking about the subject. Host In your article you address two types of geography. What are they? Irby Geography is broken into physical and human geography. In the military, we tend to really focus on physical geography: mountains, rivers, key terrains. But there’s also human geography, which can involve the spatial distribution of human characteristics like ethnicity, industry, or political boundaries. It’s fairly unusual for analysts to group all of these together as part of a geographic analysis, so I really wanted to highlight both sides of the field Host How does geography influence Russian leaders? Irby On the physical geography side, Russian leaders have historically had to compete with Russia’s insecure boundaries. They’re located on the European Plain. That really creates an insecure homeland. As a response, throughout history, they have had to militarily expand to keep their core safe, and this really manifests in trading space for time when an invading army tries to attack them, such as with Hitler and Napoleon. So, that’s one aspect: expansion is viewed as a matter of national survival. The second major physical geographic factor is their lack of access to warm-water ports. This is particularly relevant today in a globalized economy because Russia can’t export their primary exports, so oil and natural gas, like many countries do via the ocean. They have to use pipelines, which forces them to engage in multilateral agreements, as pipelines cross multiple countries. It generally makes them less stable, and you see this throughout the history of the Russian economy. It goes up and down based off of oil prices because, frankly, they’re just less competitive than countries that have access to warm-water ports. And then on the human geographic side, Russia has a shrinking population and has for a while now. And it’s only getting worse because their birth rate remains below replacement rate. When you combine that with the physical geographic factors, that means there’s fewer soldiers to put into their army to defend their expansive borders and fewer workers to run their economy. So, all of these geographic factors combined create potentially regime-threatening effects within the country. And so, that’s why it really preoccupies Russian leaders. Host So what are your recommendations for how the United States can acknowledge and address Russia’s geographically derived anxieties to develop future policy? Irby I broke my recommendations down into three categories. The first one involved economic assistance to enable Russia to develop in a way that decreases their reliance on warm-water ports. I recommended Russia transition from a oil and natural gas export to things that are more viable going into the future, such as renewable energy. Renewable energy is forced via technology to largely be a regional enterprise, which means it’s less competitive than the global oil market, which gives Russia an advantage, at least within its region. I also talked about expanding their agricultural sector because climate change might actually help Russia, they could develop more agricultural land. And then, also, building on their pre-existing manufacturing capability to sort of pivot into manufacturing sectors that are going to remain relevant in the future. They have a highly educated population, a robust industrial base, so they’ll be able to pivot to some of the more advanced manufacturing that is going to be required as the global economy continues to rev up, and that will allow them to remain relevant. My second category of recommendations involves improving governance and investing in advanced technology to address their demographic challenges. Numerous studies have found that the Russian economy is severely hampered by corruption and government inefficiency. And as a counterpoint, countries like Estonia and Latvia started from the same Soviet base, but their per capita GDP now exceeds Russia because they’ve made improvements in these areas. Building on their experience in helping Russia improve in governance areas will help their economy capitalize on what they are doing and not drag them down. Additionally, automation and artificial intelligence could ease the strain associated with the declining population. Germany and Japan already face declining populations, and they are some of the most heavily automated countries in the world. And so, these are US allies that could potentially help a Russian state improve in these areas to make their economy more viable. The third category of recommendations- most controversial category—has to do with giving Russia security guarantees that they’re not going to be invaded so that they don’t need to constantly expand to maintain the security of their state. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US debated a number of ways to expand NATO in a way that wouldn’t antagonize Russia. These included a NATO-Russia charter to have Partnership for Peace be nonbinding. Unfortunately, instead the US just expanded NATO right up to the Russian border, including former Soviet states, and that’s a sore spot for Russia. I sort of recommend revisiting some of those ideas and recommended giving Russia those legally binding agreements of nonaggression that they’ve sought. However, I also recommend that we do that in exchange for limited amounts of denuclearization and demilitarization. Obviously, a heavy cost. It would be difficult to execute. That is sort of the core of getting to the security guarantees. Host Do you have any concluding thoughts you’d like to share before we go? Irby My last bit is just that ultimately, I think an increasingly unstable and aggressive Russia poses a variety of threats to US interests. Whether it’s cyber attacks, interfering in elections, irregular warfare and partner States and the growing relationship with China. I think all of that is bad for the United States, and I think that investing in a stable and secure Russia in the future is the best way to secure our interests, which is why I ultimately make these recommendations. Host Listeners, you can read the article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters Look for Volume 53 Issue 3 (https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss3/). Caitlin, thank you for making time to speak with me today. This was really insightful and informative. Irby Thank you for having me. Host If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform.

A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force Fifty years ago, the US Army faced a strategic inflection point after a failed counterinsurgency effort in Vietnam. In response to lessons learned from the Yom Kippur War, the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command was created to reorient thinking and doctrine around the conventional Soviet threat. Today’s Army must embrace the Russo-Ukrainian conflict as an opportunity to reorient the force into one as forward-thinking and formidable as the Army that won Operation Desert Storm. This episode suggests changes the Army should make to enable success in multidomain large-scale combat operations at today’s strategic inflection point. Read the article here: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss3/10/ Read the episode transcript below. Email usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article. Keywords: strategic inflection point, Ukraine, multidomain operations (MDO), mission command, large-scale combat operations (LSCO) Episode Transcript Stephanie Crider (Host) You're listening to Decisive Point. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. I'm talking with Lieutenant Colonel Katie Crombe and Dr. John A. Nagl today, authors of “A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force,” which was published in the autumn 2023 issue of Parameters. (https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss3/10/) Crombe is an Army strategist currently assigned to the joint staff. She was the chief of staff of an integrated research project commissioned by TRADOC (Training and Doctrine Command) during academic year 2023 at the US Army War College. Nagl is a professor of war fighting studies at the US Army War College and was the director of an integrated research project commissioned by TRADOC during academic year 2023. Welcome to Decisive Point, Katie and John. John A. Nagl Thanks, Stephanie, it's good to be here. Katie Crombe Thanks, Stephanie. Host Katie, please give our audience some background and tell us about the establishment of TRADOC (Training and Doctrine Command). Katie Crombe During this study, we went back to the last strategic inflection point that we saw the Army go through. And we recognized that as 1973, following the Yom Kippur War. And so, we began digging a little bit deeper on why that was such an important point for the US Army. What we realized was not only the Secretary of Defense, but the Chief of Staff of the Army at the time, Creighton Abrams, had a revolutionary and evolutionary leader in a guy named General William E. DePuy, who was a combat leader in World War II but also known for being a deep and thoughtful intellectual. They knew that the Army needed to change. They knew that the Army needed to rise to the occasion of the conventional Soviet threat, and they figured that the training and education that the Army had established was not going to get us there. So, they had General DePuy stand up something called Training and Doctrine Command in 1973. And what he did right at the beginning was do a deep study on the 1973 Yom Kippur War through a couple of lenses, both his intellectual lens—you know, he was just deeply interested in that as a curious man— and also, his combat lens, as he lost 100 percent of his battalion in World War II. That deeply affected him, and he wanted to ensure that the US Army never faced this again. So, when he established Training and Doctrine Command, his concept was really to lead training and education and do this through a series of exercises, different ways to train, and also the development of new fighting manuals that the Army would read at echelon. Everyone from the lowest in the squad up to the division commander really could understand how and why people were fighting. And so, we really used that as the genesis. Over the years, TRADOC—as we all know it by now—I think that it's a little bit of a culture thing, but we think of it as more the doctrine side rather than the training side. We don't think of it as a revolutionary kind of think tank–type of organization. And we know now what's going on with Russia and Ukraine and what will (or could, eventually) go on with China, that we need TRADOC to go back to its revolutionary roots and really start thinking about the future. And we think that they have infrastructure and the people and the leadership to do it. It's just that they need to be the drivers of change for the future. Host John, what else can you tell us about the study that this article is based on? Nagl So, this study began when General Funk (Paul E. Funk II), then the commander of Training and Doctrine Command, asked the Army War College, about a year ago, to look at this ongoing war between the Russians and the Ukrainians, the biggest war in Europe since 1945. And General Funk believed, as I do, that the lessons available to us from this rare, horrifying event were so important that we would be sadly remiss if we didn't learn from them. And I was privileged to be able to pull together a team of what ended up being 18 students from the Army War College class of 2023 (and) half a dozen faculty members. The leader of the students was Katie, and we looked across the Army's warfighting functions. But even more broadly, we looked at medical lessons we could learn from this war. We looked at airpower and seapower lessons we could derive, and we came up with a, I think, a pretty extraordinary list of ideas that the Army, we believe, can benefit from as it prepares to deter war with China and as it prepares for whatever other fights it may have to engage in in the years and decades to come. Host Katie, you argue that TRADOC “can lead the Army back to the basics of education, training, and doctrine development at the pace that was founded, a pace that drove ruthless prioritization and reassessment.” Please expand on this idea. Crombe What we were driving toward in that is when General DePuy created TRADOC, he was really trying to bring training out of these abstract and ambiguous threats and more into a real-time training that focused on imminent threats of the day. The Ukraine War is posing such a real-life experimentation lab for us that we can put into training now as we speak. We can put these young soldiers into learning how to move combat outposts, to be more ambiguous in, you know, hiding from the enemy. And we can take so many lessons right now. We do not need to wait for 10 years to compile these lessons, you know, in the back of a library, eventually put them in a SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility) and then transfer them to some kind of training manual, eventually put them into doctrine, and then 10 years from now, we're actually exercising or rehearsing on these lessons learned. Our priority is to make sure that we get these out there in the unclassified environment as the fight is evolving and let units train to the standard that they will need to hold against a similar enemy, whether it be Russia or China, in the future. Another thing that he was really, really focused on, he being General DePuy, was carefully selecting and training soldiers and leaders and them doing this training together. It's not just sending someone out to a national training center one month a year and grading them on a scenario that they know is coming and that they've rehearsed all year. It's putting them in something that is changing by the minute, by the hour, by the day, and putting these leaders and soldiers together to learn to trust each other at echelon; to know that the person above them and below them is going to make the right decision, regardless of how dispersed or distributed they may be; and really build this trust that they'll need to conduct the kind of large-scale combat operation that we see in our future. Host TRADOC was established to transform the Army into the best-trained, -equipped, -led, and -organized land power in the world. What possibilities do you see for this organization going forward? Nagl I think it still has all those same responsibilities, Stephanie, and what we are doing is calling the organization back to its roots. So, in 1973, the United States Army was coming off of 20 years of not completely successful counterinsurgency campaigns in Asia, and suddenly proxy force for the United States, using American equipment to American doctrine, found itself challenged by the Soviet Union. TRADOC was created in response to that wake-up call, and we think there's a similar wake-up call today in a very similar historic situation in which the United States is again ending, at least for now, 20 years of counterinsurgency efforts in greater Asia. Thinking anew about large scale combat operations, we think TRADOC has the responsibility to learn those lessons, but we have another organization that's being created in the Army, just in the past five years or so. General (Mark A.) Milley, when he was Chief of Staff of the Army, created something called Futures Command. I'm actually just back from a session at Futures Command. General Jim Rainey (James E. Rainey) and his team are very interested in this study that we've been doing and in what it says about what the Army should look like in 2040. We've been sharing these lessons with him, with Futures Command, and thinking hard about how the Army adapts to this new era of what appears to be persistent surveillance, Katie talked about that a little bit, and increasingly, the artificial intelligence, robotics, human-machine pairing. Those are some of the technologies that we're seeing in their early phases being used in this current war, and we think they have huge implications for what the Army and the entire Department of Defense should look like in the decades that we're preparing for now. Host Katie, what lessons from the ongoing war in Ukraine should the American Army be paying particular attention to? Crombe I'll give you kind of our top five lines that emerged from this study, the first one being that organizational culture really needs to embrace this change coming in the Army. And what we mean at the root of that is mission command. It's not just talking to talk, but it's walking the walk with mission command. We've talked about that for the better part of two decades. It's much easier to exercise mission command when you have stadium-sized JOCs (Joint Operations Centers), perfect communication, a perfect sight picture of what's going on in the air and on the ground. That trust does not need to emerge as quickly when you have this perfect communication. So, mission command, although we say we've been practicing that, in reality, we probably are not as good as we could be, and, going forward, it's this trust that is going to be at the core of mission command. It's this training and rehearsing that we need to do together. It's understanding our fighting manuals at every echelon. It's knowing what your boss two up is doing so that if he goes that we can execute. That's what happened in World War II. And we would trust a battalion commander to become a division commander overnight because that person understood the training and the doctrine, and they trusted those around them. And that's the kind of fight that we might see in the future. So first, organizational culture needs to really adopt this mission command and walk the walk with it. The second part, and it's tangential to that, is that we believe the command-and-control nodes will be the first things targeted, and we've seen that throughout this conflict, repeatedly. The Ukrainians have adapted very quickly to this. They have very small command posts, and they move them every hour, every minute. They move them when they need to. They pick up and go. We need to do that. We need to rehearse that at every level across the Army. Along those lines, we need to make sure that our electronic signature is very small. We don't want to be able to be targeted by the enemy. And so, it's just trying to figure out how to, kind of, scramble that and make it more difficult for the adversary. The third one is that large-scale combat operations is going to produce casualties that would make our eyes water, right now, on things that we have not seen since World War II. The two decades of the fight against terrorism have not produced anywhere near the kind of casualties that we would see. So, it's not only moving casualties from a logistics perspective, but it's figuring out how our culture would accept that and the political-military connection—what we would be willing to absorb as a nation? The next one goes with that and it's just really understanding our IRR (individual ready reserve), our regular ready reserve and our retired reserve and how we can ensure that it is a more robust system that we have access to. Everyone hears about the recruiting challenges that the US Army faces right now. It's much broader than recruiting and retention. It's if we did go into this fight, we would need to replace casualties at a rapid rate, and our system is just not built for that. And then, finally, is there's been a fundamental change in the character of war overall. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have changed the way that every military is fighting. It changes the way that we operate as humans in society. Our kids. Us. It's changed everything. And that is especially true in combat. So, we need to embrace that. That's a big part of our article is that we are at a strategic inflection point because of that. We're not going to stop this evolution. It's coming. And so, we need to rapidly figure out how to incorporate these technologies into our combat and our battle formations and make the best use of them. Akin to that is really understanding the defense industrial base, and also the commercial sector and figuring out how we link better up with them knowing that Elon (Musk) can put a satellite up whenever he wants. And so, it's how do we leverage that for our good and make sure that the adversary does not use it for theirs? Host John, what lessons from the ongoing war in Ukraine should the American Navy and Air Force be learning? Nagl We started off planning to do just an Army study, but we had a Navy civilian who wanted to join the project. And I was interested in the naval implications, and retired Navy Captain Al Lord was working on the project with me. So, he took that young man under his wing. And, really, we see a lot of applications. What Katie was just talking about with artificial intelligence, unmanned systems, we're seeing that playing out very quickly, very dramatically, in the seas around Ukraine. In fact, while we've been talking, I just received a note from Al pointing out that the world's first specialized explosive naval drone unit has just been formed in Ukraine. So, we're literally seeing this all happen in real time, as we talk. I think there's an awful lot that the Navy can learn from that. If we had the Navy, I felt bad and thought we probably needed to include airpower, as well, and reached out to Maxwell to the Air War College, where a State Department officer, actually, was doing some really interesting work and wrote what may be one of the best papers in the entire project—a paper called “Potemkin on the Dnieper: The Failure of Russian Airpower in the Ukraine War.” The big surprises of this war, for me, have been Russian failure to establish and maintain air superiority and Russian failure to use cyber in a way that really brought Ukraine to its knees. Neither of those things have happened. And Sean examines why in that Small Wars and Insurgencies journal article already published. And I think the implications of what we've seen there in the air and the sea have huge implications not just for the Russo-Ukrainian War but also for any possible future conflict with China. Host Katie, do you have any concluding thoughts you'd like to share? Crombe What Dr. Nagl just brought up about the air and the sea is so important. There are some lessons on not only sustainment and logistics, sea lines of communication, but the things that we're learning that the Russians have attempted to do in the Black Sea and have maybe not been as successful as they imagine are lessons that we can take forward for the China fight. If the supply lines are interrupted on the Black Sea, there's land to go across to supply. That's not going to be true in the Pacific. So, these kinds of lessons are even more important. How do we attack ships from land? It’s kind of an old-school thought. And I think people are thinking more about it now—shore-based artillery that can get after some of these moving targets. Can the Army use HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System)? How can we be creative so that we're not so reliant on single services to approach the adversary in certain ways? So, I think that's a big thing. The other big lesson air-wise, I think, is air superiority was a given or a guarantee for us for the better part of 20 years, and no one has air superiority right now between Russia and Ukraine. And I think that's why the conflict is in the state that it's in right now after two years. No one can gain air superiority. And I think if the Russians had gained that early on, if the Ukrainians hadn’t been so creative and gotten after them with Stingers, we would be in a much different place than we are right now. So, it's making sure that our allies and partners in the future have those kinds of weapons (and) know how to employ them to ensure that no enemy can gain your superiority like that because that's the kind of fight that we're going to have. (My) final conclusion is just, you know, rapid learning is the way of the future. That's how people are approaching learning right now. It's the more knowledge, the better. I think that TRADOC really needs to embrace that and not wait to have a perfect body of work that comes out of the Russo-Ukraine conflict, but really take the lessons as they come and immediately transfer them into national training centers, into field manuals, and into doctrine that can be updated later and when necessary. But don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Host John, concluding thoughts? Nagl This study has just been an extraordinary gift. I got to work with Katie and 17 of her very talented classmates. We presented at the Army War College's Strategic Land Power Conference in May. I was invited to present our work at a joint NATO-Ukrainian conference in Poland in July, and that work is continuing to build and grow. And I'm just delighted that we're continuing the work this coming year. I am recruiting students from the Army War College class of 2024 to look at this current war. We had to knock off most of our research toward the end of 2022, and so we've got another full year of data, of history, of experience to learn from, to take advantage of the contacts I've made now, as this study has spread out across a number of armies and militaries around the globe. And my hope is that the Army War College can continue to take advantage of the talent we have in the faculty, in the student body, our friends, and our contacts, literally around the globe, to learn as much as we can from the courage of the Ukrainians, who are fighting a force that is absolutely evil, and help them find ways (to the extent that we can) to help them succeed in their efforts. But also, from their courage and from their experience, find ways to save American blood and treasure from the future wars that are inevitably going to occur. Host Listeners, you can read the article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 53, issue 3. Katie John, thank you so much for making time to speak with me today. Crombe Thanks, Stephanie. Nagl Thank you, Stephanie. Host If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform.

Episode Transcript Stephanie Crider (Host) You're listening to Decisive Point (https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/mod/67423/details/582). The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. I'm speaking with Wilson Jones, author of “The Chechen Kadyrovtsy’s Coercive Violence in Ukraine (https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss3/15/).” Jones is currently a defense analyst with GlobalData in London. Welcome to Decisive Point, Wilson. You write about the Chechen Kadyrovtsy—pro–Russian Chechens—and Ukraine. What does research say about military inequality and its relationship to coercive violence? Wilson Jones Military inequality theory is something coined by Jason Lyle in his book, Divided Armies. It draws on the ideas of many other researchers who have noticed how if a society has civilian inequalities and civilian divisions, those will be reflected in its military forces. So, if a society has a core ethnic “in” group with special privileges and a minority ethnic group who faces discrimination, then that divided nation will have a similarly divided military. The privileged “in” group is going to have priority for training and the best weapons and equipment and will typically be promoted to powerful leadership positions because they're seen as loyal to the regime. Now, the discriminated group, they'll be treated with suspicion and presumed to be disloyal. And so, they get the worst weapons (and) equipment, and are generally not promoted to leadership positions. They'll also be seen as expendable by their commanders, who typically come from that privileged “in” group. What this contributes to is using these minority ethnic soldiers in high-risk, high-casualty positions as cannon fodder. It also means that minority troops are more likely to experience coercive violence. Now, this term coersive violence refers to when allied soldiers beat torture or execute their own comrades. It's fratricidal violence. It can also involve the threats of these sorts of attacks and is used to enforce discipline or ensure that commands are followed. It can involve, literally, soldiers being forced into battle at the points of bayonets. And Russia and the Soviet Union have a very interesting history with this phenomenon. During World War II, Stalin issued Order 227, which included the infamous phrase “no step back.” It created blocking detachments who had the authority to arrest or execute retreating soldiers. Now, this is not a unique phenomenon to Russian society, and it's documented through many countries throughout history. There are many examples of coercive violence in history, but military commanders will resort to using coercive violence in desperate circumstances when they have few other options to enforce discipline. And when there is military inequality at play, it's more likely that troops seen as expendable will be victims of coercive violence. What's interesting is that soldiers from the discriminated group will produce poor soldiers not for inherent reasons but because discrimination and a lack of training and equipment naturally create demoralized and ineffective troops. So, the idea that one group is naturally superior or inferior often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Host Through this lens, tell us about Chechnya and the Chechen wars. Jones So, Chechnya is a region of the Russian Federation, and its native Chechen society is Islamic and tribal, which is very different from Russia's Orthodox and non-tribal society. In the 1990s, Chechnya tried to cede from Russia in the context of the wider Soviet collapse, and Russia waged two wars to try and prevent this. Chechnya won de facto independence in the first war, but Russia would later reinvade and win the second war, where they installed the Kadyrov family as the local collaborator regime to rule this region. So, Russia's defeat in the first war came at the hands of a very vicious Chechen insurgency. Even though Russia had more troops, overwhelming firepower, and air supremacy, Chechens launched hundreds of guerrilla attacks. They used snipers, IED bombs, and hit-and-run operations. Russian forces lacked human intelligence to selectively target the insurgency and the civilian supporters of the insurgency, which meant Russia resorted to mass violence against the Chechen population, which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and only increased the insurgency’s strength. Thousands of Russian troops were additionally killed, although casualty counts from the wars are very inaccurate. What did happen is massive anti-war backlash within Russia. After two years, the Russian military had been humiliated by tiny Chechen forces and was ultimately forced to withdraw. Now in the second war, Russia, adjusted its strategy by working with local pro-Russian Chechens, who had their own militia forces. This included the Kadyrov family and their Kadyrovtsy forces, who would eventually become the principal collaborator faction. Having Chechens fighting with Russia solved many of the problems of the first war, and instead of Russian troops dying, who had been drawn from all over the federation, eventually it would only be local Kadyrovtsy fighters who were handling the conflict. This meant that local ethnic minorities who were not official combatants were dying in the war, and these deaths minimally impacted Russian war support. Additionally, Chechen collaborators combined Russia's superior firepower with essential human intelligence on the ground to crush the insurgency. And the Kadyrovtsy and Chechnya, they were both an essential but an expendable force at the same time. Now the Kadyrovtsy, they also engaged in an extensive course of violence to maintain order within their own ranks. Torture is routine and many thousands of Chechens have been forcefully conscripted into these forces. This is especially true of former Chechen insurgents. An infamous practice is a Kadyrovtsy kidnapping an insurgent’s family to force the insurgent to surrender and continuing to hold that family as a hostage. The threat-of-kin punishment against fighter families is a defining tactic of the Kadyrovtsy. This is a very brutal regime in an impoverished area within Russia, and there's now a diaspora of several thousand Chechens who have fled the region. Kadyrovtsy fighters, however, know that if they desert, their families will be killed in retaliation. Coercive Kadyrovtsy behavior challenges some of the earlier writings on coercive violence and military inequality. I proposed in my paper that this is because of the unique regime within Chechnya. Although Chechens undoubtedly face serious discrimination in Russian society today, the Kadyrov regime has also been given extreme autonomy to rule Chechnya. The Kadyrovtsy both have a great deal of flexibility to act as they please within Chechnya and use these kin-based reprisals to maintain order. However, at the same time, their deaths as minority ethnics really don't matter to Russian society at large or the decisionmakers in Moscow. At the end of the day, they’re still a very important collaborative force to Russian control of Chechnya. Host How did the Chechen wars relate to Ukraine? Jones The Chechen wars were the first major conflict in the former USSR, and there's a very strong similarity between Russian warriors in the Chechen wars and in Ukraine today. In both cases, the leadership in Moscow is claiming to be fighting for control of a rightful or historical Russian territory and also to be fighting in the interests of the local population. In Chechnya, this involved a lot of rhetoric about fighting alleged neo-Nazis or Islamic extremists in the area, some of which was based in reality but a lot of which was mostly Russian propaganda. In Ukraine today, we're seeing, again, rhetoric about liberating ethnic Russians in the Donbass from the Ukrainian neo-Nazi government, but this is also a fabrication of Russian propaganda. Since Chechnya has been firmly under Russian control, Kadyrovtsy forces have been fighting in Ukraine for some time. They've been documented since at least 2014 with the initial Russian invasion of Crimea and the war on the Donbas. They've been present in Ukraine since 2014, with the war in the Donbas and the invasion of Crimea, but their presence has significantly expanded since 2022. The Chechen forces that are fighting for Russia in Ukraine are in a central part of Russia's military. They are generally very devoted, very well motivated troops compared to some of the more demoralized Russian conscripts and separatist militias that we observed. What the Kadyrovtsy have been documented doing, specifically, is acting as blocking detachments for Russia. When Russia fights and relies on their demoralized, poorly armed and poorly trained militia men and conscripts, the Kadyrovtsy have been the forces that force these first wave troops into Ukrainian machine guns, effectively. They are corralling masses of Russians and Russian allies into the battle. This is a significant break with military inequality theory. Typically, and this is what Jason Lyle proposed in his book, is that core ethnic troops are the ones dictating orders to minority ethnic troops. Privileged groups give orders to the underprivileged groups. What the Kadyrovtsy are doing in Ukraine is a reversal of this trend. They’re a minority ethnic force, and they are deploying coercive violence against the core ethnic groups. Again, I propose in my paper this is because of the unique regime in Chechnya and the unique relationship between Chechens and Russians. The Kadyrovtsy are a force that have experience applying coercive violence within their own ranks, and because of existing Russian-Chechen ethnic tensions, they're more than willing to beat, torture, and execute Russian conscripts; even though this causes significant Russian casualties, it ultimately helps the Russian army execute their strategy in Ukraine because it lets them extract maximum effectiveness from their poor-quality conscript troops. Host You offer strategic proposals in your article. Please share them with us. Jones So, Russia has fielded this two-tiered military force in Ukraine where Russia's core soldiers, it's crack contract troops, the airborne and armor forces who have great weapons equipment and training, and who are very reliable in combat and generally don't get demoralized. There's a second group of disposable Russian forces, who include the separatist militias from the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, the Wagner mercenary forces and other mercenary forces, and poor-quality Russian conscripts who are disproportionately drawn from poor, rural, and minority backgrounds in Russia. The most efficient use of Ukraine's military resources to fight this two-tiered military that they're facing is to target that first group the—competent head that's effectively leading the rest of this lumbering Russian body. My strategic proposals include exploiting divisions in Russia's forces for further opportunities for Ukraine. Prigozhin’s Wagner rebellion this last summer demonstrated that a large portion of the Russian military is unhappy with Putin's direction of the war, and it seems very likely that other commanders could be enticed to desert with the correct offer of financial reward (as well as amnesties for war crimes and protections from Russian reprisals.) If this were to happen, that would bring essential military intelligence to Ukraine, as well as any possible military units that would desert with their commanders. Individual Russian troops have also been demonstrated to be willing to desert. If Ukraine can facilitate this, then it lets them preserve their limited military resources for more determined Russian enemies. More determined enemies include the Kadyrovtsy, who need to be specifically targeted. This is a group that is forcing unwilling Russians into battle. Disrupting the strategy would seriously impact Russia's ability to conduct the war. The Kadyrovtsy are also what ensure Russia's control of Chechnya. If Chechen commanders or political leaders were to be killed and the group were to be shattered, this would destabilize the situation in Chechnya and effectively open a second front, potentially for Ukraine. Ukraine's already proven that they're able to target Russian targets deep inland, such as in Moscow with drone strikes. Strikes on Grozny against critical infrastructure or military targets may also have a similar impact and force Kadyrovtsy units to redeploy home. However, it seems unlikely that another Chechen war or insurgency against Russia will occur at this stage. More realistically, though, there is a Chechen government in exile, which Ukraine recently recognized. This is a secular and anti-radical organization, which is committed to building a functional democracy within Chechnya. There has been a great focus on sending weapons and material aid to Ukraine, but there should also be an application of international diplomacy to build a coalition against Russian aggression. Host Do you have any concluding thoughts you'd like to share? Jones Within the military and in this academic idea, there's a risk of painting issues in very black and white terms and that troops are either part of the privileged “in” group or the discriminated “out” group. The Kadyrovtsy are an interesting example that demonstrates that these two groups can actually overlap. They're a minority force that's definitely less important than Russia's crack contract troops. But they're much more important than disposable Russian conscripts or Ukrainian militiamen. I think that this highlights a very important area for future research. For Ukraine, understanding Chechnya demonstrates how Russia's sitting government conducts war, and that helps characterize how Russia will act in the ongoing war in Ukraine. In the First Chechen war, as well as in the earlier Soviet-Afghan War, Soviet and Russian forces became demoralized from acceptable casualties. They still retained plenty of military means and resources, but they lacked a coherent strategy for victory and a political will to fight, which prompted a withdrawal. So far in Ukraine, we're not seeing the signs of a comprehensive military victory from either side, but instead, a very slow grinding attrition. Ukraine's ongoing counteroffensive has been played up in Western media as a decisive final battle, but this was always an unrealistic characterization. I think it's more likely that we'll witness a result similar to the Chechen wars in Ukraine, either like in the First Chechen War, Russia exhausts itself and withdrawals, or like in the Second Chechen War, Russia's enemy is exhausted and collapses, and a pro-Russian collaborator regime is installed. Helping Ukraine means recognizing that this conflict is not ending soon, that they'll need support and material to outlast Russia in a long war. Host Listeners, you can find the article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 53, issue 3. Wilson, thank you for making time to speak with me today. Jones Thank you for having me, Stephanie. I appreciate it. Host If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform.

This podcast analyzes the US Army’s successive recruiting crises, identifying their consistent patterns and the efforts to resolve them, and makes three provocative arguments. First, there is a long-standing institutional tension between recruiting personnel for the combat arms and technical and administrative specialists. Second, many of today’s talent management problems were first identified in a 1907 General Staff report and reiterated in subsequent studies. Third, the Army has pursued innovative recruitment strategies, but much of their success depended on factors outside the service’s control. The podcast concludes with four history-based recruiting lessons and an affirmation that the 2019 Army People Strategy recognizes the need for the Army to revise its talent management approach. Read here: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss3/9/ Keywords: recruitment, US Army history, personnel policy, talent management, Army People Strategy

This podcast offers a preview of the latest Parameters demi-issue and full issue. Read the issue here: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss3/7/ Keywords: recruiting, Ukraine, Taiwan, Antarctica, Russia, Chechen Kadyrovtsy

This episode showcases the understudied institutional Army, the generating force, as a critical prerequisite for overall strategic success. Competition, crisis, and conflict require more than the manned, trained, and equipped units that deploy. This podcast analyzes six case studies of institutional Army reforms over 160 years to examine adaptation in peace and war. The conclusions provide historical insights to inform current practices and fulfill the Army’s articulated 2022 Institutional Strategy. https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss2/14/ Keywords: institutional Army, generating force, Department of the Army staff, Army Futures Command, adaptation, innovation

This podcast presents four factors to consider in evaluating Taiwan’s strategic importance to the United States and its allies and answers a question often raised at forums concerning the Indo-Pacific: “Why should the United States care” about this small island in the Pacific? The response often given is simply US credibility, and while this is an important factor, this podcast reviews a wider array of possible factors to consider when answering that question. The study of these factors should assist US military and policy practitioners in accurately evaluating the related strategic environment. Through a survey of official US policy statements and strategy documents across administrations, part two of this article (to be featured in a future issue) will examine the evolving US perception of Taiwan throughout the aggressive strengthening of China and during Taiwan’s domestic political development into a full-fledged democracy. Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss2/11/ Keywords: Taiwan, geopolitical, credibility, democracy, authoritarian About the author:Luke P. Bellocchi, JD, LLM, MSSI, MBA, served in senior and senior executive positions throughout his government career and is now an associate professor of practice at National Defense University, where he teaches strategy and a China elective at the Joint Advanced Warfighting School. His recent work, “The U.S. One China Policy: A Primer for Professional Military Education,” can be found at https://jfsc.ndu.edu/Media/Campaigning-Journals/.

In 1944, Third US Army created a cohesive and flexible system for managing information and denying it to the enemy that aligned operational concepts with technological capabilities. The organization’s success in the European Theater highlights its effective combined arms integration. An examination of the historical record shows the creative design of the Signal Intelligence and Army Information Services enabled Third Army to deliver information effects consistently and provides a useful model for considering the dynamics at play in fielding new and experimental multidomain effects formations. Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss2/14/ Keywords: World War II, Third United States Army, military effectiveness, force design, information advantage About the author: Major Spencer L. French, US Army, is a military intelligence officer currently assigned as the operations officer for the 704th Military Intelligence Brigade at Fort Meade, Maryland. His research interests focus on historical military innovation and force design.

National security practitioners need to understand the motives, mindsets, and intentions of adversaries to anticipate and respond to their actions effectively. Although some authors have argued empathy helps build an understanding of the adversary, research points to its cognitive component of perspective taking as the more appropriate skill for national security practitioners to have. In this podcast, Dr. Allison Abbe synthesizes previous research on the development and application of perspective taking in analysis and decision making and recommends four ways strategists and practitioners can enhance their ability to gain insight into adversaries. Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss2/9/ Keywords: perspective taking, strategic empathy, political psychology, military education, cognitive bias Episode Transcript: Understanding the Adversary: Strategic Empathy and Perspective Taking in National Security Stephanie Crider (Host) You’re listening to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production focused on national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. I’m talking with Dr. Allison Abbe today, author of “Understanding the Adversary: Strategic Empathy and Perspective Taking in National Security,” which was published in the Summer 2023 issue of Parameters. Abbe is a professor of organizational studies at the US Army War College. Her research focuses on the development of leadership and intercultural skills in national security personnel. Welcome to Decisive Point, Dr. Abbe. Dr. Allison Abbe Thanks for having me. Host Your article synthesizes research on perspective taking in analysis and decision making and recommends four ways strategists and practitioners can enhance their ability to gain insight into adversaries. Will you please explain perspective taking in the context of strategic empathy? Abbe Sure. So, strategic empathy has been talked about in terms of understanding adversaries and competitors and being able to better anticipate their actions. And in psychology, the topic of empathy has been more in the context of helping relationships between clinicians and patients, or clinicians and clients in the context of mental health. And so, there’s a rich literature on empathy but in a slightly different context than in the national security arena. In psychology, empathy is talked about in terms of empathic concern for the other person or party, motivation to engage in empathy, and then perspective taking. So those three components are not as equally applicable in the national security arena as they might be in a one-on-one relationship—an interpersonal relationship like in a romantic relationship or a patient-practitioner medical kind of context. So, focusing on perspective taking allows us to pull just the really relevant skills about empathy that can be applied in the national security context and focus more on how it is people can go about understanding the cognitive perspective of someone else without taking on the emotions of another party or really wanting to help the other party. You can maintain your own interests while understanding the perspective of the adversary, or even a partner. Host How can leaders and strategists develop perspective taking as a skill? Abbe So, perspective taking as a basic ability develops in childhood. We know from the developmental psychology literature that we’re capable of it as small children. But it’s a very cognitively demanding skill, and so people don’t automatically engage in it. Your default is to use your own perspective, and then you only take on someone else’s perspective with additional cognitive effort. And so, even though people have the capability to do it, they aren’t necessarily applying it in day-to-day life. And so, it takes a lot of intention to use perspective taking and to get better at understanding other people’s perspectives. You can really only take on someone else’s perspective if you understand their context and you understand the person. And so, it’s important to have the background knowledge that would enable you to really understand their perspective. You have to have that information available to be able to do that effectively. So, study of another party’s decision-making patterns, the influences—cultural or regional influences—on their decision making would be important, as well as having the time and energy to engage in that perspective-taking skill. Host What unique challenges and opportunities are there in the national security context of perspective taking? Abbe One of the unique challenges is the distance often from the other party. And so, you’re trying to take on the perspective of somebody that you don’t have an opportunity to interact directly with. And so, you could watch their speeches, you can read what they’ve published, what they’ve written (or at least what their speech writers have written for them). But in the national security context, you don’t necessarily have the opportunity to ask them questions so you can better understand their perspective the way that you would if you were a doctor interviewing a patient (or in an interpersonal relationship) to try to better understand the other’s perspective. And so, that distance and the lack of opportunity to interact directly is certainly one limitation or challenge. So, then you have to use other sources of information to try to gain that perspective. I think one of the unique opportunities that we haven’t always engaged in this context is that perspective taking can really help make better decisions and choose among courses of action. So, if you understand the other party, whether it’s an individual foreign leader or it’s a local population in a village, and you’re trying to help them counter terrorism influences in their community, you have to understand what they care about, what they’re motivated by, what their interests are . . . in order to make better decisions about how to interact with them and how to advance US interests. Host Are there any research gaps or challenges that we need to consider regarding this topic? Abbe One of the research gaps is we’ve had difficulty in psychology, at least, in developing measures of perspective-taking ability. So, that’s one limitation. The typical way to go about measuring it is to use a self-report questionnaire, which is really good for assessing people’s motivation to engage in perspective taking. But it’s not as good at measuring their accuracy and doing it as a skill. As a really important cognitive skill, we should have better tools to go about measuring how well people are engaging in perspective taking (and) how accurate they are in engaging perspective taking. And so, that’s one research gap that could be addressed in the behavioral sciences. Another one is just on the development and application of perspective taking. How is it that we can encourage practitioners to engage these skills as they’re acquiring other skills at the same time? I’ve talked about it in the article in terms of its relationship to systems thinking, which is another important cognitive skill set. Cross-cultural competence is another area where there’s intersection. And so, then, how do we develop this skill in practitioners at the same time that they’re developing these other important skills that are applicable to their work? Host I think we have a few extra minutes if you have any concluding thoughts that you’d like to share before we wrap it up. Abbe One of the interesting areas for further research is looking at various tools to develop perspective-taking skill. There’s some interesting research, in college students, at least, that shows that reading literary fiction is one way to develop perspective taking. Literary fiction helps you take on the perspective of the characters in the novel and can help people develop perspective taking. And it doesn’t develop from just watching movies or reading popular fiction. There’s something about the challenging nature of literary fiction and requiring cognitive effort and really diving into characters that seems to help. There’s limited research on that, but that’s really one interesting avenue. Studying history, of course, is one way to develop better perspective-taking skills. So, there might be some interesting research avenues for that as well. Those are two good ways of potentially developing that people can use in their own free time, as reading is, you know, one common hobby. So, directing people to the kinds of sources that might help them develop the skill set and understanding how that develops would be an interesting area for further research. Host You can read more about perspective taking and empathy at press.armywarcollege.edu. Look for volume 53, issue 2. Dr. Abbe, thank you so much for making time for me today. This was really interesting. Abbe Thank you so much. Host If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform. About the author: Allison Abbe, PhD, is a professor of organizational studies at the US Army War College. Her research focuses on the development of leadership and intercultural skills in national security personnel. She previously worked as a research psychologist and program manager in defense and intelligence organizations and holds a PhD in social and personality psychology from the University of California, Riverside. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling, Joint Force Quarterly, Government Executive, War Room, Parameters, Military Review, and Police Practice and Research.

Scholars have been using the wrong card games to analyze Carl von Clausewitz’s analogies in On War, which has led to errors in understanding his ideas. This podcast identifies the games Clausewitz discusses, allowing for a more accurate interpretation of his original meaning for the study of war. Since Clausewitz’s ideas underpin strategy development within service education systems, it is critical his ideas are fully understood in context. Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss2/12/ Episode Transcript: Geniuses Dare to Ride Their Luck: Clausewitz’s Card Game Analogies Stephanie Crider (Host) You’re listening to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production focused on national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. I’m talking today with Dr. Nicholas Murray. Murray designs and runs war games for the Secretary of Defense Strategic Thinkers Program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Professional Military Education. He also translates the works of Carl von Clausewitz and other theorists. He’s the author of “Geniuses Dare to Ride Their Luck: Clausewitz’s Card Game Analogies,” which was published in the Summer 2023 issue of Parameters. Welcome to Decisive Point, Nick. Nicholas A. A. Murray Thank you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure. Host Your article asserts that scholars have been using the wrong card games to analyze Clausewitz’s analogies on war, which has led to errors in understanding his ideas. Please expand on that. Murray The reason I got into this . . . I think a bit of background might help . . . is the card games we use, which are typically blackjack, poker, or games like chess and bridge and things, didn’t seem to line up with what else I was reading and finding in his histories in terms of how he understood luck. And so, as I dug into it, the question struck me, which was what games would he have actually been familiar with, and what would he have played? And except for chess, the other games weren’t popular or even invented at the time of his life or writing. So, I started to look into that. What I found was that the games that he had in mind and actually discussed often—sometimes explicitly—were different stochastically in terms of luck. And they were different in terms of player interaction. And they were different in terms of things like cheating, which was an inherent part of almost all the games with which he was familiar. Taking that into account, it meant that contemporary analogies, using, say, blackjack, where one can card count, you can change the strategy of playing against the casino in your favor, for example. That simply didn’t exist. And so, he wasn’t thinking about something like that. He was thinking about something far more chance ridden than we have in mind. Host Which card games was Clausewitz likely talking about? Murray The three I’ve been able to identify, along with something called würfel, which is a version of a variety of different dice games, which is simply you roll a dice and bet on it. Sort of like craps, I suppose. But the three main ones are games called faro, skat, and ombre. And these were games that were familiar to Clausewitz. He explicitly references two and implicitly references skat via phrases that occur within that game. These card games are much different from the ones we would think about in terms of blackjack or poker. I think it’s worth the reader just having a quick understanding, if that would be helpful, I think, of what these entail. Faro is often described as little better than playing dice. It’s a banking game based on an older game called basset. Multiple players can play. The banker turns over a card, and you bet on a number. And if your number is matched by the card that turns up, you can win. And then the bets, depending on how you play, typically, you can win 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 times your stake, depending on the way the bank is set up. So, it’s enormously risky. It’s inherently wonderful for the banker. It’s typically known as one of the most fraudulent games . . . across cultures I found, as well, which is quite interesting. It’s all on the turn of a card. It’s essentially all about luck. There’s really no skill involved. And there’s no player interaction, either, which is one of the things that current scholars often, when they talk about card games, talk about the interaction between players. So, one of the main games that Clausewitz explicitly references has virtually no interaction with players and is almost exclusively luck based. It’s fundamentally different from often how we look at and interpret what he’s saying. Skat is a trick-taking game that originated in Thuringia, just near where Clausewitz was living. It was popular at the time. It typically involves three players. Good luck or bad luck can overcome a bad hand or good hand, respectively, irrespective of the skill of the player. But skill is definitely required, as is a good strategy. And then the third game, again, this is one of the two he explicitly references, is ombre, which was the (probably) card game of the seventeenth and early–eighteenth centuries. It requires an enormous amount of luck. Daring play is often celebrated and rewarded, even if it leads to losses. And so, it‘s the nature of the game, and how you play it is as important as the fact that it‘s a trick-taking card game, that’s inherently luck based. You can have a strategy, but players are celebrated for being exceptionally daring when they play, and that’s something to take into account when we’re thinking of context about how he and his contemporaries would have thought about what this means. Host Clausewitz writes about the relationship between risk and chance. Examining his writings through the lens of these card games you just told me about, how might this alter the meaning of previous interpretations of his work? Murray I think it’s profound. We tend to see and we tend to think about Clausewitz as, you know, making sure you understand what it is you’re getting into before you start anything. And I don’t think that changes, but it really drives home that if it’s as chance ridden as he is implying with the type of games he has in mind, then that behooves us really to emphasis that question, which is what is it you’re trying to achieve here? What do you think it’s going to take? Because chances are, as soon as you start, it’s going to be far more costly, far more difficult, and far less likely to match any of your preconceptions or ideas. And so, when we think about it today, what we often see is, if we just do enough analysis (sometimes you’ll see if we’re using the example of whether it’s chess or bridge or things like this, if we count cards, if we play skillfully) we can pretty much guarantee X outcome or Y outcome. And what Clausewitz is saying is, “No, that may help us in terms of if luck is on our side. But in reality, luck plays such a big role, and emotion plays such a big role” particularly if the other side is cheating, and that’s something that’s often not taken into account when we think about this. With the idea that if we can’t really predict these things, and one of the things that he tells us about this— and it gets often mentioned but ignored—is he talks about (Leonhard) Euler and (Sir Isaac) Newton, two of the greatest mathematical minds of the previous four or five centuries, I should think, and certainly the previous two centuries for Clausewitz. If they can‘t figure this stuff out, these are equations that are beyond them, as he puts, essentially, how are we meant to, sort of, as mere mortals actually figure this stuff out? And so, one of the points that he’s driving home here is you’re always betting against the odds. And the bank essentially is the opponent or luck or whatever it is . . . fate. And he’s not necessarily always exactly clear about this. So, if that’s the case and we’re always betting against the odds, and luck plays a role, we have to be daring because we can make a series of small bets and hedge our bets or be cautious, but at the end of the day, we can make losses on each of those small bets and we’ll never win big. Even if we win the occasional bet, we’re not going to actually win the war or win that particular part of the campaign or whatever it is that we’re trying to do at that particular moment. So his argument, to a certain extent, is if you believe you’ve made all the right choices, you’ve amassed your force, you’ve done the things you’re meant to do, you need to commit and you need to dare to win, essentially. So when he’s, then, looking at historical examples, he looks at Frederick. He looks at Napoleon. And he’s often sarcastic, as well, with both of them—but particularly with Napoleon. But one of the things he really highlights is how important daring is and the moral courage to make a bold decision. And he frequently excoriates those historical commanders who fail to do that. He’s absolutely scathing, “feeble minded beetles,” he calls the Austrian generals “scurrying around on the battlefields in 1796.” He’s really trying to drive home this connection between this moral courage, luck, and, obviously, his concept of genius. Host What do we need to consider, then, going forward? Murray It’s tough because I’m not necessarily 100 percent sure. Partly because, obviously, for me, I’ve been sort of in the middle of this, but also, I’ve been teaching PME (professional military education), and Clausewitz is fundamental to PME instruction, pretty much across the globe. The standard translation is the Howard and Paret translation, and it’s important because they downplay the role of luck. And they emphasize and actually enhance (far more than Clausewitz does) the role of rationality. There’s a number of reasons for that. A number of scholars that Professor (Antulio) Echeverria, Professor Hugh Strachan, and, I mean, a number of scholars, have looked at this and talked about these issues. What this tells us, to a great extent, is, actually, that’s, in many respects, not only wrong, but fundamentally misleading that Howard and Paret have emphasized this. We understand why they did it. The Cold War was going on and they’re trying to de–risk catastrophic thermonuclear war, essentially. Or reduce the likelihood of it. But the problem we have for scholars is that we’re teaching service personnel to make decisions in the future using this. Well, if he’s not actually talking about something that’s fundamentally predictable in a way that we’ve often implied, if not explicitly stated, what does that mean for the types of decision making, the types of officers or officer education? And I think for the services, it’s profound because I think we really have to emphasize decision–making ability moral courage, which, to a certain extent, is an ethics question, as well, not just physical courage. We really have to emphasize that first part there, and that’s something I know that’s built into the service education systems. But I also think we have to think about what does that mean for the way we conceive of prewar planning . . . prewar strategy in–war planning and in–war strategy? Do we hedge, constantly, our bets—as we’re often wont to do? But if Clausewitz is right, I’m not saying he is, but if he is, I do think we fundamentally need to reconsider how we think about those big, particularly prewar and planning, questions. Or certainly planning questions within a conflict and the way that we actually train officers and educate officers, right down through the entire decision–making command structure of the armed services in terms of what is it we’re trying to get out of this and what’s the best way of approaching this if Clausewitz is right? And I happen to think he probably is, which then means do we need to reconsider the entire education structure of the armed services in terms of what we emphasize within decision making, within the theoretical part of the courses the officers take—particularly JMP levels one and two And I think, with that in mind, we also need to think about do we provide enough context within the education system to explain what he’s getting at? And I’d argue with what I’ve learned in researching this is any indication, we don’t provide necessarily enough context for the officers and decisionmakers to actually fully understand what the philosophers or theorists were talking about for the officers to extract the most utility out of what they’re learning. And, that’s ultimately what we need them to do. It’s not just developing their brains. It’s extracting utility from their education as well. Host Do you have any concluding thoughts you’d like to share? Murray I do think we need to relook at the version of On War that we use in PME. There are other versions out there, whether they’re ideal or not I don’t know. Chris and I, who’ve done three volumes of Clausewitz, we’re working on a fourth, and I won’t give the names, but we’re already starting to retranslate and we’re finding a number of things like this within the new translation that come up that are not necessarily the same but similar to what I found with the issue with just the one question of card games. I do think that going forward, we need to reconsider, as well, the use of decision exercises, war games . . . not necessarily ones that lead to practicing and exercise but ones that allow the officers to make multiple decisions in an uncertain environment against a live opponent. And I think in PME we have some absolute centers of excellence where that occurs, but I don’t think it’s built into the curricula in the way that it could or should be because I think having officers, in particular, and NCOs as well, practice decision making on a regular basis in an environment, ultimately, that it’s only ever little wooden blocks or pixel people that get killed, but allowing them to learn and grow from something that ultimately is low–threat in terms of actual life allows them to develop that ability to rapidly make and practice things like bold decision making, which, of course, comes with consequences. And I’ll give a quick example. I had a board game about 12 years ago at Command and General Staff College. It’s the Battle of Battle of Frœschwiller from the Franco–Prussian War. One of my officers was doing exactly what he should be doing, which was being very bold and aggressive with the Prussian army attacking the French position and (this is from 1870) and after about two hours of fighting, in terms of game terms, he said, “I’ve lost several of these units. How many casualties is that doc?” And I said, “Well, you’ve actually taken about 8, 000 to 10,000 casualties in about 2 – 3 hours of fighting.” And he just paused and said, “That can’t be right.” So I said, “No, no, that’s absolutely right. And if you keep pressing on, what you’re doing, actually, is incredibly successful. It’s incredibly bold.” He did press . . . credit to him. Because I’ve had officers go, “I can’t do that,” even though they’re little figures on the table. Mentally, that’s sometimes too much. So, he pressed on, and he absolutely crushed the French even more catastrophically than what happened historically. It was one of the best results in terms of that particular battle of war game that I’ve seen, but it was one of those that that moment of sudden recognition. Now of course, we want that to happen in a war game. We don’t want that to happen in real life, but if it does happen in real life, we want it to lead to a devastating success. And so, that would be one of those things, I think, that perhaps if we could build more of that into the education system, I think it would benefit all of us. (The web group has the wargame rule set for the scenario for the Battle of Frœschwiller. Owner Christoper Pringle is making this available for free for a limited time. There are many other free scenarios for war games here as well. https://groups.io/g/bloodybigbattles) Host Listeners, you can dig into the article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 53, issue 2. Nick, thank you for making time to speak with me today. This was a real treat. Murray Thank you. Host If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform. About the author: Nicholas Murray, D.Phil. F.R.Hist.S., is the author of four books: The Rocky Road to the Great War (Potomac Books, 2013), examining the development of trench warfare prior to 1914, and three translations (with commentary) of Clausewitz’s histories covering the French revolutionary campaigns in 1796 and 1799–1800. He is currently working on further translations of Clausewitz and other theorists. He designs and runs wargames for the Secretary of Defense Strategic Thinkers Program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and professional military education. He has advised and assisted the Office of the Secretary of Defense with policy regarding military education and wargaming, and he has received numerous awards, including the Exceptional Public Service Award—the office’s highest medal. Keywords: card games, luck/chance, genius, gambling, daring, probability, trinity, cheating