Download or read book Strategic Assessment in War written by Scott Sigmund Gartner and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do military organizations assess strategic policy in war? In this book Scott Gartner develops a theory to explain how military and government leaders evaluate wartime performance, how much they change strategies in response to this evaluation, and why they are frequently at odds when discussing the success or failure of strategic performance. Blending history, decision theory, and mathematical modeling, Gartner argues that military personnel do reevaluate their strategies and that they measure the performance of a strategy through quantitative, "dominant" indicators. But different actors within a government use different indicators of success: some will see the strategy as succeeding when others see it as failing because of their different dominant indicators. Gartner tests his argument with three case studies: the British shift to convoys in World War I following the German imposition of unrestricted submarine warfare; the lack of change in British naval policy in the Battle of the Atlantic following the German introduction of Wolf Packs in World War II; and the American decision to deescalate in Vietnam after the Tet Offensive. He also tests his approach in a nonwar situation, analyzing the Carter Administration's decision to launch the hostage rescue attempt. In each case, his dominant indicator model better predicts the observed behavior than either a standard-organization or an action-reaction approach.
Download or read book Shaping Strategy written by Risa Brooks and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Good strategic assessment does not guarantee success in international relations, but bad strategic assessment dramatically increases the risk of disastrous failure. The most glaring example of this reality is playing out in Iraq today. But what explains why states and their leaders are sometimes so good at strategic assessment--and why they are sometimes so bad at it? Part of the explanation has to do with a state's civil-military relations. In Shaping Strategy, Risa Brooks develops a novel theory of how states' civil-military relations affect strategic assessment during international conflicts. And her conclusions have broad practical importance: to anticipate when states are prone to strategic failure abroad, we must look at how civil-military relations affect the analysis of those strategies at home. Drawing insights from both international relations and comparative politics, Shaping Strategy shows that good strategic assessment depends on civil-military relations that encourage an easy exchange of information and a rigorous analysis of a state's own relative capabilities and strategic environment. Among the diverse case studies the book illuminates, Brooks explains why strategic assessment in Egypt was so poor under Gamal Abdel Nasser prior to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and why it improved under Anwar Sadat. The book also offers a new perspective on the devastating failure of U.S. planning for the second Iraq war. Brooks argues that this failure, far from being unique, is an example of an assessment pathology to which states commonly succumb.
Download or read book Assessing War written by Leo J. Blanken and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-15 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today's protracted asymmetrical conflicts confuse efforts to measure progress, often inviting politics and wishful thinking to replace objective evaluation. In Assessing War, military historians, social scientists, and military officers explore how observers have analyzed the trajectory of war in American conflicts from the Seven Years’ War through the war in Afghanistan. Drawing on decades of acquired expertise, the contributors examine wartime assessment in both theory and practice and, through alternative dimensions of assessment such as justice and proportionality, the war of ideas and economics. This group of distinguished authors grapples with both conventional and irregular wars and emerging aspects of conflict—such as cyberwar and nation building—that add to the complexities of the modern threat environment. The volume ends with recommendations for practitioners on best approaches while offering sobering conclusions about the challenges of assessing war without politicization or self-delusion. Covering conflicts from the eighteenth century to today, Assessing War blends focused advice and a uniquely broad set of case studies to ponder vital questions about warfare's past—and its future. The book includes a foreword by Gen. George W. Casey Jr. (USA, Ret.), former chief of staff of the US Army and former commander, Multi-National Force–Iraq.
Download or read book Net Assessment and Military Strategy written by Thomas G Mahnken and published by . This book was released on 2020-03-25 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *This book is in the Rapid Communications in Conflict and Security (RCCS) Series (General Editor: Geoffrey R.H. Burn). The Office of Net Assessment (ONA) was responsible for carrying out three programs in the Department of Defense from November 1973 until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Net assessments utilize a multidisciplinary approach to defense analysis to capture the dynamics of national or coalition military strengths and weaknesses for comparison with the capabilities of competitors and adversaries. In this book, essays by experts including a number of individuals who have served in or worked for the ONA in the past, such as Andrew Marshall (Director of the United States Department of Defense's Office of Net Assessment, 1973-2015) and Andrew May (Associate Director of the United States Department of Defense's Office of Net Assessment) offer critical insights on the relative military power of the United States vis-à-vis potential adversaries over time. This book is an invaluable resource for scholars and students in international relations, political science, and conflict and security.
Download or read book Strategic Theory for the 21st Century The Little Book on Big Strategy written by Harry R. Yarger and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2006 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Operation Iraqi Freedom written by Thomas Donnelly and published by American Enterprise Institute. This book was released on 2004 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study argues that the George W. Bush administration charted the correct strategy in Iraq, but has failed to match its military means to its strategic ends.
Download or read book Success and Failure in Limited War written by Spencer D. Bakich and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-03-20 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Common and destructive, limited wars are significant international events that pose a number of challenges to the states involved beyond simple victory or defeat. Chief among these challenges is the risk of escalation—be it in the scale, scope, cost, or duration of the conflict. In this book, Spencer D. Bakich investigates a crucial and heretofore ignored factor in determining the nature and direction of limited war: information institutions. Traditional assessments of wartime strategy focus on the relationship between the military and civilians, but Bakich argues that we must take into account the information flow patterns among top policy makers and all national security organizations. By examining the fate of American military and diplomatic strategy in four limited wars, Bakich demonstrates how not only the availability and quality of information, but also the ways in which information is gathered, managed, analyzed, and used, shape a state’s ability to wield power effectively in dynamic and complex international systems. Utilizing a range of primary and secondary source materials, Success and Failure in Limited War makes a timely case for the power of information in war, with crucial implications for international relations theory and statecraft.
Download or read book Strategic assessment 2020 written by Thomas F. Lynch III and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Asia Pacific written by David Lai and published by Army War College Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dr. David Lai provides a timely assessment of the geostrategic significance of Asia-Pacific. His monograph is also a thought-provoking analysis of the U.S. strategic shift toward the region and its implications. Dr. Lai judiciously offers the following key points. First, Asia-Pacific, which covers China, Northeast Asia, and Southeast Asia, is a region with complex currents. On the one hand, there is an unabated region-wide drive for economic development that has been pushing Asia-Pacific forward for decades. On the other, this region is troubled with, aside from many other conflicts, unsettled maritime disputes that have the potential to trigger wars between and among Asia-Pacific nations. Second, on top of these mixed currents, China and the United States compete intensely over a wide range of vital interests in this region. For better or for worse, the U.S.-China relationship is becoming a defining factor in the relations among the Asia-Pacific nations. Third, the U.S. strategic shift toward Asia-Pacific is, as President Obama puts it, not a choice but a necessity. Although conflicts elsewhere, especially the ones in the Middle East, continue to draw U.S. attention and consume U.S. foreign policy resources, the United States is turning its focus toward China and Asia-Pacific. Fourth, in the mid-2000s, the United States and China made an unprecedented strategic goodwill exchange and agreed to blaze a new path out of the tragedy that often attends great power transition. Fifth, at this time of U.S. strategic reorientation and military rebalancing toward Asia-Pacific, the most dangerous consideration is that Asia-Pacific nations having disputes with China can misread U.S. strategic intentions and overplay the ¿U.S. card¿ to pursue their territorial interests and challenge China. Finally, territorial dispute is becoming an urgent issue in the Asia-Pacific.
Download or read book Military Strategy A Very Short Introduction written by Antulio J. Echevarria II and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Military Strategy: A Very Short Introduction adapts Clausewitz's framework to highlight the dynamic relationship between the main elements of strategy: purpose, method, and means. Drawing on historical examples, Antulio J. Echevarria discusses the major types of military strategy and how emerging technologies are affecting them. This second edition has been updated to include an expanded chapter on manipulation through cyberwarfare and new further reading.
Download or read book America s Security Role in a Changing World written by Patrick M. Cronin and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book NATO s Air War for Kosovo written by Benjamin S. Lambeth and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2001-11-16 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a thorough appraisal of Operation Allied Force, NATO's 78-day air war to compel the president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, to end his campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. The author sheds light both on the operation's strengths and on its most salient weaknesses. He outlines the key highlights of the air war and examines the various factors that interacted to induce Milosevic to capitulate when he did. He then explores air power's most critical accomplishments in Operation Allied Force as well as the problems that hindered the operation both in its planning and in its execution. Finally, he assesses Operation Allied Force from a political and strategic perspective, calling attention to those issues that are likely to have the greatest bearing on future military policymaking. The book concludes that the air war, although by no means the only factor responsible for the allies' victory, certainly set the stage for Milosevic's surrender by making it clear that he had little to gain by holding out. It concludes that in the end, Operation Allied Force's most noteworthy distinction may lie in the fact that the allies prevailed despite the myriad impediments they faced.
Download or read book A Savage War written by Williamson Murray and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 617 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the Civil War changed the face of war The Civil War represented a momentous change in the character of war. It combined the projection of military might across a continent on a scale never before seen with an unprecedented mass mobilization of peoples. Yet despite the revolutionizing aspects of the Civil War, its leaders faced the same uncertainties and vagaries of chance that have vexed combatants since the days of Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War. A Savage War sheds critical new light on this defining chapter in military history. In a masterful narrative that propels readers from the first shots fired at Fort Sumter to the surrender of Robert E. Lee's army at Appomattox, Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh bring every aspect of the battlefield vividly to life. They show how this new way of waging war was made possible by the powerful historical forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, yet how the war was far from being simply a story of the triumph of superior machines. Despite the Union’s material superiority, a Union victory remained in doubt for most of the war. Murray and Hsieh paint indelible portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and other major figures whose leadership, judgment, and personal character played such decisive roles in the fate of a nation. They also examine how the Army of the Potomac, the Army of Northern Virginia, and the other major armies developed entirely different cultures that influenced the war’s outcome. A military history of breathtaking sweep and scope, A Savage War reveals how the Civil War ushered in the age of modern warfare.
Download or read book The Fundamental Elements of Strategy written by Xiu-bao Yu and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-03-29 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book clarifies confusions of strategy that have existed for nearly 40 years through the core thoughts of three fundamental elements. Unlike the traditional definition of strategy as "a plan to achieve a long-term goal from overall considerations”in a linear view, this book defines strategy from non-linear viewpoint as it is in the real world. The art of a strategy lies not only in the determination of development goals, but also in the identification of development problems and putting forward overall guiding ideology of solving problems. Rich illustrations as well as numerous business and military cases are presented in helping readers to understand the fundamental elements of strategy.The general scope of the book includes introductions to the three fundamental elements of strategy, three-sub decisions of a complete strategic decision, incomplete strategies, relationship between tactic and strategy, three elements of competitive and corporative strategies. There may be biases in company-level, real strategic decision-making which makes a complete strategy not necessarily a perfect one. The book introduces biases and reasons for the biases, helping industrial strategic decision-makers understand the importance of knowing the nature of the company, the industry and its environment. In addition, this book also presents principles and evaluation approaches of strategic decisions, explores the reasons for the excessive definitions of the strategy concept, and discusses directions of future’s research tasks.The book will benefit business managers who are interested in knowing what a complete strategic decision is and how to avoid errors or biases in strategic decision-making. It also benefits students in business schools (especially in MBA/EMBA programs) who are (or will be) on executive positions. Academic researchers may find it is interesting to understand strategy from the view of the three elements. The new view provides a novel insight into strategy and promotes several research directions in the future. The three elements of strategy are also applicable to military strategies and readers who are interested in military and may find its value as well.
Download or read book Strategic Appraisal written by Zalmay Khalilzad and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 1999-05-11 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Advances in information technology have led us to rely on easy communication and readily available information--both in our personal lives and in the life of our nation. For the most part, we have rightly welcomed these changes. But information that is readily available is available to friend and foe alike; a system that relies on communication can become useless if its ability to communicate is interfered with or destroyed. Because this reliance is so general, attacks on the information infrastructure can have widespread effects, both for the military and for society. And such attacks can come from a variety of sources, some difficult or impossible to identify. This, the third volume in the Strategic Appraisal series, draws on the expertise of researchers from across RAND to explore the opportunities and vulnerabilities inherent in the increasing reliance on information technology, looking both at its usefulness to the warrior and the need to protect its usefulness for everyone. The Strategic Appraisal series is intended to review, for a broad audience, issues bearing on national security and defense planning.
Download or read book Strategic Information Warfare written by Roger C. Molander and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 1996-02-28 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Future U.S. national security strategy is likely to be profoundly affected by the ongoing, rapid evolution of cyberspace--the global information infrastructure--and in particular by the growing dependence of the U.S. military and other national institutions and infrastructures on potentially vulnerable elements of the U.S. national information infrastructure. To examine these effects, the authors conducted a series of exercises employing a methodology known as the Day After ... in which participants are presented with an information warfare crisis scenario and asked to advise the president on possible responses. Participants included senior national security community members and representatives from security-related telecommunications and information-systems industries. The report synthesizes the exercise results and presents the instructions from the exercise materials in their entirety.
Download or read book The Military Balance 2022 written by The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-02-14 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published each year since 1959, The Military Balance is an indispensable reference to the capabilities of armed forces across the globe. It is used by academia, the media, armed forces, the private sector and government. It is an open-source assessment of the military forces and equipment inventories of 171 countries, with accompanying defence economics and procurement data. Alongside detailed country data, The Military Balance assesses important defence issues, by region, as well as key global trends, such as in defence technology and equipment modernisation. This analysis is accompanied by full-colour graphics, including maps and illustrations. With extensive explanatory notes and reference information, The Military Balance is as straightforward to use as it is extensive. The 2022 edition is accompanied by a fullcolour wall chart illustrating security dynamics in the Arctic.