Geography & Strategy - CounterStrikeMedia

WHAT A WEAK CHINA LOOKS LIKE & HOW NAVY'S PRIOR ENGAGEMENTS SHAPE ITS SOUTH CHINA SEA POLICY

12/31/2017

The Kindleberger Trap
Joseph Nye of Harvard University introduced a new – and already indispensable – concept to the Sinological lexicon. Whereas China could fall into the "Thucydides trap" if it appears too strong and provokes a challenge from the US, Nye's "Kindleberger trap" describes a China that invites a different set of problems by acting too weak.

China Could Wage a Bloody War to Save North Korea
By Robert Farley, National Interest: “Although disagreements between Washington and Beijing over Taiwan and the South China Sea have hardly subsided, it increasingly appears that affairs on the Korean Peninsula would provide the spark for conflict.”

Where China Leads, the Rest of the World Follows…
By Enrique Dans, Medium: “China is now a society in which everything, whether online or in the real world, is collected, analyzed and processed: if you walk down the street or drive your car, a camera will pick up your face or your license plate and it will identify you in less than three seconds, building a detailed map of your habits, your movements and associating them with your online activities, where a vast army has been tasked with eliminating all dissidence and reaffirming the beliefs and the guidelines lines set by the government.”

China's Soft and Sharp Power
Joseph Nye draws a clear distinction between measures that elicit others' attraction and those that coerce assent.

WHAT CLAUSEWITZ TEACHES FOR OUR AGE ABOUT NORTH KOREA & THE PENTAGON'S DIFFICULTY WITH DETERRENCE

12/28/2017

Speak to the Heartland: Lessons from Kissinger’s Defense of Détente
By Matthew F. Ferraro, RealClearDefense: “In the face of a resurgent present-day isolationism that repudiates the post-war international order that has advanced human dignity, prosperity, and peace, McCain’s revival of Kissinger’s campaign is a venerable act of public service. And it is an effort that bears expanding by others inspired by his example at this seminal moment.”

Revolutionary Change Is Coming to Strategic Leadership
By Steven Metz, Strategic Studies Institute: “Clausewitz famously observed that war has an enduring nature and a changing character that evolves over time as technology, society, economics, and politics shift. This observation also applies to strategic leadership: it too has an enduring nature and a changing character.”

America’s Overreliance on Military Intervention
By Willis Krumholz, RealClearDefense: “How did we get to the point where we have so many troops in so many places that not even members of Congress, let alone average Americans, can keep track of it all?”

The Pentagon’s Difficult Relationship With Deterrence
By Joshua Pollack, War on the Rocks: “So what do we mean by “classical deterrence theory”? Definitions vary, but there are two essential ideas: one that arose in the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a second, complementary idea that took form over a decade later as the Soviet Union tested its first intercontinental ballistic missiles. Viewed against the background of established military thinking, each idea was revolutionary in its own right.”

Deterrence in the Last Sanctuary
By Zack Cooper & Thomas G. Roberts, War on the Rocks: ““The U.S. built a glass house before the invention of stones… The shifting of space [from] being a benign environment to being a warfighting environment requires different capabilities.””

The Role of Offset Strategies in Restoring Conventional Deterrence
By Octavian Manea, Small Wars Journal “ ... technological offset strategies played an important role during the Cold War. The thinking about offset strategies can actually be traced to WW2. When the United States entered the war, planners concluded that the U.S. would need over 200 infantry divisions and about 280 air combat groups to ultimately defeat the Axis powers.”

Analytic Criteria for Making Strategic Choices
By Barry Watts, CSBA: “Choosing analytic criteria for making strategic choices or judging historical outcomes is a recurring, if not universal, problem. It recurs because no general method for choosing appropriate criteria is known to exist despite the early hopes for methodological innovations ranging from macroeconomic models to operations research, systems analysis, and game theory.”

OUR STRATEGIC OPTIONS WITH NORTH KOREA

Dr. Strangelove and the Insane Reality of Nuclear Command-and-Control
By Franz-Stefan Gady, The Diplomat: “Stanley Kubrick’s iconic dark comedy continues to highlight the importance of nuclear command-and-control safety mechanisms.”

THE LESSONS OF DIEN BIEN PHU, WHY THE U.S. NEEDS A MARITIME STRATEGY (THUCYDIDES) & THE ROLE OF SUBMARINES

12/27/2017

The Lessons of Dien Bien Phu
by Miles Maochun Yu via Military History in the News
The most consequential military engagement in Southeast Asia in the 20th century is the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu. It was fought ostensibly between the French and the communist-led Vietmin at Dien Bien Phu, an obscure valley bordering China, in the remote northwestern part of what was then French Indochina. The battle ended with a humiliating defeat for the French, which brought down the French government, ended French colonial rule in Asia, ushered in America’s epic military involvement in the region for decades to come, and fundamentally changed the global geostrategic landscape.

The Navy and Nation Need a Maritime Strategy
By Paul S. Giarra, Proceedings Magazine: “Since the closing of the American frontier, U.S. Navy strategy has been both instrument and guide for U.S. national power, international engagement, opposition to hegemony and totalitarian regimes, and the global assertion of U.S. interests and values. Today presents one of those junctures when the Navy should step up again to lead the thinking, strategies, plans, and capability development necessary in a challenging and competitive world. But first there must be a viable Navy narrative.”

The Strategist Top Picks for 2017:
The Strategic Role of Submarines in the 21st Century
By Andrew Davies, The Strategist (ASPI): “Submarines might be obsolete by the middle of the century. It’s possible that advances in artificial intelligence (AI), detection systems and signal processing, combined with swarming autonomous unmanned systems, could make it effectively impossible for submarines to maintain their stealth.”

Editors’ Picks for 2017: ‘The Thucydides Trap … or a Trap for Young Players'
By Allan Behm, The Strategist (ASPI): “But if one is to coin a term like ‘Thucydides Trap’, declaring that war between Athens and Sparta was ‘inevitable’, and blame Thucydides for the invention, one should surely check the original text to confirm that ‘inevitability’ is what Thucydides wrote and meant.”

HOW U.S. THAAD GOES ON KOREA

12/14/2017

Nuclear Deterrence In a New Age
By Keith B. Payne, National Institute for Public Policy: “Carl von Clausewitz writes that the nature of war has enduring continuities, but its characteristics change with different circumstances. Similarly, the fundamental nature of deterrence has endured for millennia: a threatened response to an adversary’s prospective provocation causes that adversary to decide against the provocation i.e., the adversary is deterred from attack because it decides that the prospective costs outweigh the gains.”

HARD LESSONS FOR "THE LONG WAR"

12/14/2017

BREAKING DEFENSE

COLIN GRAY ON NUCLEAR STRATEGY & THE LIMITS OF AN INDIRECT APPROACH TO WAR

12/12/2017

Strategic Sense and Nuclear Weapons Today
By Colin S. Gray, National Institute for Public Policy: “We in the West have fallen perilously behind Russia in the development and deployment of every category of what we understand and usually refer to as strategic forces. Furthermore, the general understanding of nuclear issues by the contemporary cohort of professionals and commentators has sagged deplorably.”

Destroyer of Worlds – Taking Stock of Our Nuclear Present
By Elaine Scarry, Eric Schlosser, Lydia Millet, Mohammed Hanif, Rachel Bronson, Theodore Postol, Harper's Magazine: “In February 1947, Harper’s Magazine published Henry L. Stimson’s “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb.” Seventy years later, we find his reasoning unconvincing. Entirely aside from the destruction of the blasts themselves, the decision thrust the world irrevocably into a high-stakes arms race — in which, as Stimson took care to warn, the technology would proliferate, evolve, and quite possibly lead to the end of modern civilization.”

"The Limits of the Indirect Approach," Tony Badran, Hoover Institution

RAND CORP., U.S. ARMY LIMITATIONS IN LEVANT & AFRICA

Nuclear Deterrence In a New Age
By Keith B. Payne, National Institute for Public Policy: “Carl von Clausewitz writes that the nature of war has enduring continuities, but its characteristics change with different circumstances. Similarly, the fundamental nature of deterrence has endured for millennia: a threatened response to an adversary’s prospective provocation causes that adversary to decide against the provocation i.e., the adversary is deterred from attack because it decides that the prospective costs outweigh the gains.”

3 MILITARY IDEAS FOR DEALING WITH NORTH KOREA

12/12/2017

Three Military Ideas for Dealing With North Korea
By James Stavridis, Nikkei Asian Review: “Even as the range of the North Korean missiles continues to expand, the nuclear weapon program grows as well. We should expect another nuclear test soon -- probably after the holidays -- which may well include an "over ocean, above surface" test of a hydrogen bomb.”

THE CHANGING CHARACTER OF WAR

12/9/2017

Changing Calculus and Learning from our Enemies
By Vera Mironova & Craig Whiteside, Strategy Bridge: “Strategic and operational decision makers need to pay close attention to the ever-changing character of war against different enemies—conventional or irregular—in distinctly different environments. This often means learning from our enemies.”

CHANGING U.S. ASIAN ALLIANCE STRUCTURE

12/7/2017

It's Time To Change America's Alliance Approach In Asia
by Miles Maochun Yu via Military History in the News
Last week marks the 63rd anniversary of the signing of the Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States of America and the Republic of China. The historic mutual defense treaty, signed on December 2, 1954 in Washington, provided an ironclad guarantee to keep Taiwan from being invaded by the People’s Republic of China between 1955 and 1979. Since President Jimmy Carter unilaterally terminated the vital treaty on January 1, 1979, Taiwan has been subjected to constant threats of invasion by the communist government in Beijing, as the subsequent Taiwan Relations Act does not guarantee direct military assistance to Taiwan if China invades the island democracy.

How to Save (Or Destroy) the Royal Navy
By James Holmes, The National Interest: “Talk about role reversal. A long century ago, starting in 1909, Great Britain entreated its Pacific dominions—Canada, New Zealand, Australia—to construct “fleet units” to supplement a Royal Navy that confronted multiple challengers in multiple theaters. The fleet unit, then, was a strategic concept for a mass-production age.

CHINA'S THREAT OF A.I & PUTIN THINKS OF HARMING U.S. INTERESTS GLOBALLY

12/6/2017

The Threat of China's Artificial Intelligence Strategy
By Gregory C. Allen, CFR: “China’s tech giant Baidu is unambiguously one of the global leaders in AI research, having developed an AI system with better-than-human speech recognition performance a year before any Western firm. China is not yet the overall leader in AI technology, but they are not far behind and catching up quickly.”

Russia Prepares for More Extreme Confrontations With the United States
By Pavel K. Baev, Eurasia Daily Monitor: “Whatever friendly feelings United States President Donald Trump might personally hold toward Moscow, the anti-Russian policy of his administration is even bolder than the course set in the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency.”

RETHINKING SUN TZU, COUNTERING CHINA & THE ACHILLES HEEL OF CHINA'S AIR FORCE

12/5/2017

The Achilles Heel of China's Air Force
By Robert Farley, The Diplomat: “The Achilles Heel of China’s Air Force (PLAAF) has long been its lack of practical experience, both in combat and in deployments distant from Chinese borders.”

Rebuilding the Military to Counter China
By Dan Blumenthal, The Hill: “Thus, it is no surprise that China has engaged in a vast, ambitious military modernization program, even as almost all other countries have significantly slowed their defense spending since the end of the Cold War. Indeed, history will likely record the U.S. military drawdown, during the same years that Washington became more concerned with China, as strategic malpractice.”

Rethinking Sun Tzu
By John F. Sullivan, Strategy Bridge: “The author James Clavell once wrote that if he were ever put in charge of the U.S. military, he would require all generals to take an annual written and oral exam covering the tenets of Sun Tzu—with those scoring below 95 percent being summarily dismissed. Predictably, the proposal never gained much traction within the Pentagon, but the hypothetical exam raises an interesting question. Would we even be able to agree on a common, testable understanding of the principles inherent in The Art of War? ”

THE QURAN & MORAL STRATEGY FOR THE LONG WAR

12/5/2017

The Qur’an: A Chronological Modern English Interpretation
By Kellie J. McCoy, Strategy Bridge: “The gap we must close in modern society to achieve lasting international stability is vast. It is an intellectual divide that is multi-dimensional, layered, nuanced, complex, and sometimes maddening.”

WHAT'S STRATEGY FOR FAT GOVMINT FOR 'THE LONG WAR'

12/3/2017

BREAKING DEFENSE

Defense
The White House is expected to release a new national security strategy in the next few weeks. White House national security adviser H. R. McMaster said the strategy will be based on “principled realism.”

Since the end of the Cold War, National Defense Strategies (NDS) have repeatedly served as opportunities to redefine American force structure and interests globally. Unfortunately, the most recent generation of strategies has become increasingly unmoored from the strategic reality the country faces. In testimony last Thursday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Mackenzie Eaglen argued that the NDS must answer what missions the military should prioritize, and, by extension, it must clearly delineate what it can stop doing. Claiming the “five challenges” of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and persistent counterterrorism operations are all equally important is not strategy — it is the absence of one. Read her prepared remarks.

For an in-depth look at where and how the US military should be using its resources for the next five years, read Eaglen’s major report, “Repair and Rebuild: Balancing New Military Spending for a Three-Theater Strategy,” from this past October. Access it here.

To execute its new national security strategy, the US will need to grow and modernize its military. Candidate Trump promised to rebuild the American military to such a size and extent that the country’s “military dominance” would “be unquestioned.” In a Weekly Standard op-ed, Gary J. Schmitt details how President Trump is failing to live up to this promise of a massive military buildup. Read it here.

CSBA CONGRESSIONAL TESTIMONY
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THUCYDIDES & THE LONG WAR PROBLEM
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No More 'Whack-a-Mole'
By Monica Duffy Toft, The National Interest: “Can U.S. foreign policy be rationalized so that it advances a positive and sustainable national objective? This is a critical question, but sadly it is a question that has escaped historically-informed analytical scrutiny and debate for decades.”

reagan_future_risg-2019-essays.pdf
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GREAT POWER DOCUMENT.pdf
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GREAT POWER COMPETITION EXAMINED

Dr. Colin S. Gray

Summary of His Life's Work on Strategy.pdf
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GLOBAL GEOPOLITICS

ATLAS PRO YOUTUBE

DOUGLAS BARRIE: SPACE DEFENSE

THOMAS BUSSING: RAYTHEON MISSILE DEFENSE, STRATEGIEST

JAMES ACTON: NUCLEAR MISSILE DEFENSE

DR. MICHAEL PILLSBURY

HENRY ROWEN
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CHARLES WOLF JR.
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tutorials-from-a-sphinx.pdf
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ANDREW MASHALL 'YODA'
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AMERICA NEEDS NEW ALLIANCES

why_america_needs_new_alliances_-_wsj.pdf
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POLYBIUS & ANCIENT GRAND STRATEGY
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CENTER FOR POLITICAL & MILITARY POWER

SUN TZU ISN'T WORKING FOR CHINA ANYMORE

SUN TZU ISN'T WORKING FOR CHINA
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THE QURAN & MORAL STRATEGY FOR THE LONG WAR

WHEN WAR WITHOUT END, FINALLY ENDS

WHEN WAR WITHOUT END, FINALLY ENDS
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THUCYDIDES & THE LONG WAR PROBLEM

HOW TO UNDERSTAND THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR

WHAT HAPPENED DURING PELOPONNESIAN WAR
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THUCYDIDES TRAP IS GREAT POWER COMPETITION

THUCYDIDES TRAP = GREAT POWER COMPETITION
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WHAT THUCYDIDES TRAP GETS WRONG
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CENTER STRATEGIC, BUDGETARY ASSESSMENTS: U.S. GRAND STRATEGY

DAVID P. GOLDMAN COLUMN ASIA TIMES

HOW BEST TO UNDERSTAND U.S. - CHINA RELATIONS

STRATEGY BRIDGE

Winning World War IV David P. Goldman.pdf
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THE NEW ASIAN OBSERVER

Tweets by WilliamHolland

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