Tag Archives: Strategy
The Future Ashore
Since contemplating Janus a month and a half ago we’ve seen a lot of ink spilled about national security affairs. The majority of it is driven by the fiscal challenges facing the U.S. government. Here, Maynard, Cushing, & Ellis discuss two articles by land-force Generals on the future of their forces in light of these challenges.
Read MoreMaritime Janus
January is named for the Roman God Janus, the two-faced deity of the doorway or the threshold. With one face looking toward the future, and the other contemplating the past, Janus inspires the annual reviews of naval affairs as well as the predictions for the future that we see in the naval blogosphere. New [...]
Read MoreSwarms at Sea and Out-swarming the Swarms?
This week Foreign Policy posted a new article by Navy Postgraduate School professor John Arquilla, in which he discusses the how “swarm” tactics employed by the Russians caused the failure of Napoleon’s 1812 invasion. Arquilla is a prolific author who regularly writes about swarms and “net-centric” operations. In the above piece he cites successful maritime [...]
Read MoreBridging the Moat
Late summer has arrived in Annapolis, bringing the Brigade of Midshipmen back with it to the Naval Academy. The halls echo anew with the footsteps of midshipmen and I hear the muffled, disembodied voices of my colleagues delivering lectures through the walls. As I begin the teaching/learning cycle anew, first principles have often been on [...]
Winter is Coming
Heat waves, rising temperatures, and retreating ice grab headlines today. However, receding sea ice in the Arctic and a concurrent increase in shipping traffic will intensify attention on the globe’s (still) frigid northern reaches. Though the United States issued a forward-looking Arctic policy with National Security Presidential Directive 66 in 2009, it has not seriously faced the implications [...]
Read MoreThe Sinews of War
I don’t know what the hell this “logistics” is that Marshall is always talking about, but I want some of it. – Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King to a Staff Officer, 1942 Carting around beans and bullets has never much interested me until recently. Of course, the Military Sealift Command has been on my mind [...]
More Mahan and Corbett
In my last post I criticized those who overemphasize the size of a fleet as a measure of its operational effectiveness, using the historical example of the Royal Navy’s fleet modernization efforts prior to the First World War. I did not offer any alternate criteria by which to judge what an optimally sized U.S. Navy would look like. With [...]
China as the New Germany and a 300-Ship Navy
Is China today in the same strategic position as pre-First World War Germany? If China’s current economic rise and expanding naval power makes it the modern counterpart to Wilhelmine Germany, does the U.S. face a similar set of strategic choices as turn-of-the-century Great Britain? The British response to Germany’s new fleet was to redouble its [...]